Originally published on October 14, 2009 at Yo Mama For Obama
You gotta read this Op-Ed by Garrison Keillor, which was printed in the New York Times today:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
I include an excerpt that is particularly relevant:
A person can run down the list of all that’s wrong with this country, including the lobbyists who cross back and forth from public service to influence-peddling like alligators on the golf course, or the bankers who lost their minds in the great mortgage mania, but the country has a history of rising to challenges and turning away from demagogues and doing what needs to be done. Because we are a passionately patriotic people, infused with a love of our history and our land, and so we have limited patience for fools, such as the ones who now dominate the right.
Conservatism is a powerful strain in American life that ordinarily passes as common sense. Save for a rainy day. Don’t foul the nest. Don’t burn your bridges. Don’t sacrifice the future for short-term profit. But when it contradicts itself and becomes weighted down with bigotry and cynicism, then it doesn’t hold water any more.
With just a touch of appropriate irreverence coupled with a sufficient dose of honesty that aptly describes the current state of the Republican Party, Keillor makes his point. He is correct when he says that the Republican reaction to President Obama’s Nobel award is "68% envy and 32% sour grapes." My Mama would have summed up the situation in two words: "They’re jealous."
To find negativism in this award is no party platform. Sorry, even in the absence of any substantive policy footholds, the GOP is going to have to dig deeper. Wishes are not reality, and the reality of the Republicans is nowhere, nada, zilch. The GOP represents an empty platform indicative of an empty, simply retaliatory, strategy.