The ultraconservative pundidiots have telegraphed their attack strategy for the next few years, the criticism they're going to fire at the new president and new Congress. But realize, the Far Right is guilty of exactly these sins. And in the new case, it's actually a virtue, and there's an opportunity to turn these attacks on their head.
Here it is now, Thursday 11/6/08, two days after one of the most momentous changes in American history. And already I see the conservative pundidiots have gotten their talking points and marching orders. We know how they're going to come at President Obama and the expanded Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Ready for it?
"Overreaching".
I read three conservative columnists this morning, and all of them used the same word, repeatedly, to describe what Democrats "always" do when they're in power. They "overreach", and then the public - that is, the conservatives - pull them in. The new president isn't even sworn in - and they already have accusations of "overreaching" at the ready.
This how the Far Right will survive the next few months, possibly years. This is how they will excuse themselves from any soul-searching on the failures of the last eight years or on the resounding repudiation of their philosophy that was handed to them this week. They will console themselves that, sooner or later - probably sooner - Obama and the Dems in Congress will do something to "overreach", and the public will realize the mistake they made and sweep the conservatives back into office on a wave of freshly-regained sanity.
Mark my words - every proposal to come out of Obama's presidency is going to be tarred with this brush. Every single one is going to be held up as an example of liberal overreaching. This is the new Far Right battle cry.
Set aside for a moment the possibility of implied racism - Obama should know his place as a black man, and not reach too high or too far, right? - and concentrate instead on the naked hypocrisy of it.
You want overreach? I'll give you overreach.
How about seven trillion dollars of new Federal debt? (Look closely - that's $7,000,000,000,000.00. I'm not kidding.) This, from the people who claim to be fiscally responsible.
How about America's first-ever unprovoked war of aggression? If that's not overreaching, nothing is.
How about the largest redistribution of wealth in world history, from the poor and middle class into the hands of the already-obscenely-wealthy? Robin Hoodism gone mad. Our wages are stagnant, or declining, and the top 1% continues to gobble up what we used to have. And then they got their taxes reduced to make sure they got to keep more of it. Overreaching plutocracy, that's what that is.
How about ignoring human rights? From the revocation of the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, to unsupervised domestic wiretapping, to sanctioning of torture, to secret prisons, to blatant voter suppression, to searches without probable cause at airports, to requiring passports to travel to Canada and Mexico, to fear-induced border fences, to government funding of religious organizations... the list goes on ... we are less free than we were. We are on the verge of becoming a fascist dictatorship. Overreaching of Federal authority, anyone?
How about unprecedented expansion of executive power? Shrub has produced, what is it, 800 signing statements? He'll sign bills into law, with an attached warning that he intends to simply ignore whatever the bill says anyway. Monarchs are used to doing things like that, that is, simply doing whatever they want to. Overreaching the Constitutional powers of the presidency should be an impeachable offense. (Wait... it is? Then why did this criminal serve out his full term?)
How about deregulation? Shrub deregulated banks, consumer protections, pollution control, the financial markets, FEMA, the insurance industry, and anything else he could reach. We're seeing the results of that, as we get lead-painted toys, insurance policies that won't actually pay claims, a tanking economy, pet food that kills our pets, post-Katrina disasters, and on and on. There was a reason these things used to be regulated. We've gone over the edge in erasing Federal oversight.
These are only a few examples of how ridiculously far the conservatives have overreached over the last eight years. It's past time to see it for what it is, and to yank them back in.
Yet in typical Far Right fashion, we're going to hear accusations of extremism from the extremists. To be fair, driving along the centerline does seem like going far left to someone who's already way past the ditch on the right. Imagining we might be able to pull this nation out of the stinking mess the last eight years have left is in, maybe that is reaching pretty damn high. The alternative, though, is to let ourselves drown in the Shrubian dung.
How do we combat the coming accusations of overreaching? Do we limit ourselves, do we be cautious, do we take tiny steps instead of try for long strides? Hell, no.
Our only rational choice now is to aim high, dream big, reach as far as we possibly can. Universal health care to put us on par with the rest of the world, New New Deal-type stimulus and jobs programs to revive our economy, a radical shift in how we conduct our foreign policy, the repeal and un-doing of Shrub's fascist anti-American anti-rights agenda, a return to sane limits on executive power, the re-establishment of oversight in places we desperately need it - yeah, we have a lot to reach for, an incredible amount of work to do.
Maybe we won't get it all done. But we've got to start, we've got to try. Let the conservative pundidiots tell us we're "overreaching". Let's let them see what "overreaching" is really all about.
Embrace it. Go for it. Reach as far as you can. We might fall short, but we can't achieve more than we try for, and we have so very, very far to go to get us out of the morass they've left us in.
So when they say "The Dems are overreaching again!" you say, "You betcha! We have dreams of actually making this country back into what it was supposed to be."
If trying to un-do the last eight years is "overreaching", I'm all for it. In fact, I'm all for going farther than that. Let's try to make an actual positive improvement, not just get us back to zero. We have an historic opportunity. If we don't do it, no one will.
Yeah, okay, that's a pipe dream, a blue-sky, head-in-the-clouds, Quixote-like series of overused metaphors. You say that as if it's a bad thing.
We've already proven that unimaginable things can happen, if we only have the courage to imagine them. Remember last Tuesday? Like, two days ago? When we had an example of overreaching at its finest?
We have to aim high, or we've already failed.
Or, as Robert Browning put it, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"