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Tiger, tiger, burning red/ Where so long its fangs have fed [1]
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Date: 2022-12-10
Of all the years for polls to show Dems pining for “unity,” 2022 may have been the worst imaginable. In the aftermath of the GOP’s narrowly failed coup the previous year, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, how can you join forces with the tiger that holds your head in its mouth?
Even the deep red pundit Rich Lowry (writing in 2000, in the Washington Post) scolds peddlers of “cozy...comity.” Pleas for “unity,” he observes, “threaten...the vitality of American politics” via “a fuzzy and anodyne tone inimical to serious argument.”
Seeking the White House that year (with more than a few smirks), George W. Bush dubbed himself “a uniter, not a divider.” Eight years on, Barack Obama clucked “We’re choosing unity over division.” (No argument there.)
In between, Bush thrived (as President) for several years while invading and occupying Iraq under false pretext, then effectively smearing as treasonous those who objected. (If that was unifying, Dick Cheney was a horse whisperer.)
Let it be stressed. To reach out to Donald Trump’s cult of personality was not merely to sap the political arena’s “vitality;” it was to appease the Vladimir Putin acolyte who, in 2020, would openly plan to “get rid of the ballots” that might not suit him.
Granted, the very nice Joe Biden beat him. In two respects, though, the vote was too close for comfort. One, in our quaint, democracy-averse Electoral College, the outcome was harrowingly tight. Two, had not Covid revealed Trump to be a superspreading/nostrum hawking/economy scourging wing nut, computer models showed him not just besting Biden, but crushing him.
The 80-ton Godzilla in the Rotunda is that, with the GOP calling J6 “legitimate political discourse,” we could have used the ‘22 contests as a stage on which to resolve the once proud Party of Lincoln’s true colors as anything but red, white, and blue. (Better late than never, let’s face it: we miserably failed.)
With tiger’s (or dragon’s) breath searing our scalps, let’s hope Dems can learn where nice pols tend to finish- and that standing up to the likes of Bush, Trump, Roger “Get Right To The Violence” Stone, and/or Ron DeSantis does not mean straining to withstand what they dish out; it means fighting like hell to survive.
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