The Haters

Rush Limbaugh says that he hopes President Obama will fail. Is he serious? Wow, this surprised me. His "reasoning" seems to be that, if Obama succeeds, he will have succeeded only in ushering in socialist solutions to our current economic woes. Ergo, he must fail.

What's interesting here is that Limbaugh isn't saying that socialist policies will fail (put aside, for now, what constitutes "socialist"), but rather that if socialist policy succeeds, this is itself a failure for us. This, of course, is a complete tangle. If an economic remedy worked -- if it succeeded -- by any measure of success I'm aware of, the country would be (somewhat definitionally) better off. Because the policy worked! And so, Limbaugh is apparently at war with "socialistic policies" regardless of outcome. Now that's an ideologue. Better that we plant both feet in traditional capitalism come hell or high water than try non-capitalist policies, because God forbid they might work (and then what?).

Of course I'm not a "socialist"; this not what I'm getting at. It's just so over the top to want a President to fail, just to preserve some view of the world. This is not my view of America or politics generally.

On the other side of things, right-of-center thinkers especially, please take time to watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann and immediately after The Rachel Maddow Show. They're so Rush Limbaugh. I get this perverse sense of superiority watching people with such a simple rubric, their whole raison d'etre predicated on the proposition that "the other side" is evil. It's really good viewing.

Mainly, lately, it's the simple idea with these shows that "Bush is evil". That's it. I've been watching. That's pretty much it. It's an almost religious calling to continually open wounds and fester them and spew forth venom at George Bush. Bush is an idiot, he should be accused of war crimes, he ruined the country, and on and on. I keep hoping, but there seems no possibility of acknowledging anything positive whatsoever about the Bush years. Nothing. There's just this Limbaugh-like failure to accept or to even grasp the context of the former Administration, and indeed the precarious place that we all occupied in the wake of September 11.

Nothing but hatred... that's easy enough. What's harder is to try to figure out what happened, why particular decisions were made, what effects they had (positive and negative), and what can and should be done better next time. A sober, thoughtful analysis. But you won't get this from Olbermann or Maddow.

In the same vein, Limbaugh ought to attempt a similar treatment of Obama's current plans. But he won't. And so you won't get it from him either. And on and on the haters go.

The Terrorists

Muslim militants are at it again. Shocker.

101 people dead and counting. Here we go again. And in America, the conspicuous disappearance of any public discussion about terrorism for some time now. As if, it's a Bush topic. Somehow, some way, in our domestic self-absorption, I think we've managed to connect the unpopular President Bush with the idea of terrorism, as if, ridding ourselves of the one, the other will somehow go away, or just be a non-factor. But of course it won't go away, as we've seen tonight.

I confess to shedding Oprah Tears (or, I mean, getting stricken with Obamamania). But now the hard realities. Politic campaigns, Democrats back in power, none of this represents a solution; we haven't solved anything yet. Obama hasn't solved anything yet. He doesn't even have the job yet (yet somehow the world has seemed a safer, better place, hasn't it?). And what a job he will have. The militants in Mumbai, apparently, checked passports to round up the Americans and Brits. Nice to confirm that we're still the evil ones. And I'm sure we'll retain the title for some time, whether our new President has a Southern drawl or not. They don't care. President Elect can sound like Albert Einstein (actually, that might be a tad too tutonic, but you get the picture). He's still representing the Evil Nation, as far as extremists are concerned.

So now the blood on the streets, and the fires, and the frantic shouts are with us once again. And we hear once again that they were targeting the U.S. and Great Britain. It's I think safe to reject the notion that the Mumbai attackers didn't tune in to CNN recently enough to know that Barack Obama is our President Elect. They don't care.

Addendum
Poor Rachel Maddow. She's been yuck yucking it up lately, feeling the Obamamania oh-so-much. And now to see her somber face, talking off of the teleprompter about terrorists targeting Americans, doing her level best to keep up the light-spirited Bush-is-a-dummy banter in the rest of her show. Damned breaking news. Yes, damned indeed. I do hope that I'm wrong. But those dark days of September 11 never left us. We just wished them away.