[Cross-posted from my blog www.BetterDonkey.org. Please check us out]
In his colum in today's NYTimes, David Brooks essentially asks the Democrats to be grown ups even though the Republicans have acted like 12 year old bullies for the past 10 years:
Will we learn from DeLay's fall about the self-destructive nature of the team mentality? Of course not. The Democrats have drawn the 10-years-out-of-date conclusion that in order to win, they need to be just like Tom DeLay. They need to rigidly hew to orthodoxy. They need Deaniac hyperpartisanship. They need to organize their hatreds around Bush the way the Republicans did around Clinton.
The old team is dead. Long live the new team.
It strikes me that Brooks is acting alot like an ex of mine. Selfish and petty.
It was one of those relationships where no matter how long we dated, she always got to act like a childish imp, and I was forced to act like the adult. She throws a temper tantrum, I calmly wait for it to blow over then I pick up the pieces. She freaks out and says a bunch of mean shit, I sift through the wreakage and try to reassemble the relationship. Eventually I got tired of playing adult to her destructive teenager and decided I'd had enough (that and she started tossing it around like they were about to make it illegal...oy).
Brooks' selfish double standard reminds of that same relationship. He wants Democrats to put country over party when in fact its the Republican Leadership that forced that Sophie's Choice upon us.
More to the point, the fact of the matter is, people reject the current congress and their leadership. People look at Iraq, Katrina, the economy, gas prices, Tom Delay, Bill Frist and health care costs and say...what happened to my government? I thought they were supposed to help make my life better? I thought their job was to help improve the world, not fall asleep at the switch (at best) or actively make it worse.
American Government is in a shambles. It is quickly falling apart.
- We are unable to respond to major national emergencies. [Katrina]
- Poverty is growing and becoming more and more entrenched [Katrina]
- We are losing a war where we can't even define victory. [Iraq]
- Global warming is rapidly becoming irreversible. [Katrina & todays' frightening snapshot of the polar ice caps]
- Global terrorist organizations are expanding their ability to attack at will. [Iraq, London bombings, Israel, you name it...]
- The American economy is becoming dangerously unsound and the American worker is becoming increasingly obselete [Education, "The World is Flat," outsourcing in India, the Rise of China]
The fact is, the reason Democratic leaders are asking their supporters to rally around their standard and to show some party loyalty is that the Republicans have so wrecked our Government and the prospects for American success, that we have no other option.
When your teenager burns down your house, runs up 25 grand in credit card debt and crashes your car, you and the wife don't disagree with each other in front of him. You do that behind closed doors so that you can show a united front when you, the adult, try to right the incredibly irresponsible damage the little bastard has done.
The fact is, Rebpublican government is a failure. Democrats are the only ones with any chance of fixing it. I'll be damned if we should let selfish bastards like David Brooks tell us that we should play nice just because he says so.
Fuck nice. Nice doesn't save New Orleans.