Politics has gotten too bitter. Most people want our government to do a good job for the sake of everyone. Scarborough makes a good case for conservatism because he's decent. Ugly rhetoric is such a turn off--on the left and the right.
All of a sudden this Alan Grayson guy, someone who uttered Holocaust and healthcare reform in the same sentence, has moved into hero status on the left. He's fighting for a good cause but that kind of hyperbole shouldn't be coming from anyone's mouth. He's doing exactly what the left has been attacking the right for. Hyperbole is mistaken for backbone these days.
Perhaps that's because there is a void of reason and the obnoxious can easily jump in to fill the emptiness.
Scarborough's column yesterday thanked the Obamas for trying to win the Olympics but made a larger point:
For the better part of 20 years, a bitterness has infected our politics that has weakened our country.
We Republicans spent eight years trying to delegitimize Bill Clinton.
Democrats spent the next eight years doing the same to George W. Bush.
Now that a Democrat is in the Oval Office again, it is the GOP who is trying to delegitimize a sitting president.
When I try to talk to Republicans about the need to break this cycle of viciousness, some cite the chapter and verse of every hateful left wing attack against George W. Bush.
Whenever I attempt to have a conversation with some Democrats about the need for us respect our president-- whether he be an Obama or a Bush-- I am told that Bush deserved whatever he got because he was a lying war criminal who hated the Constitution and loved torturing people.
Fortunately, there are a growing number of Americans who believe we cannot continue going on this way.
You and I may disagree on how the CIA handled terror suspects. But that does not mean that you are soft on terrorism anymore than it means that I hate the Constitution.
You and I may have a different approach to Afghanistan. But just because you want to stay there another five years doesn't mean you are an imperialist. And if I believe a decade in that forsaken land is more than enough, that doesn't mean I'm soft on al Qaeda or the Taliban.
It just means that we view the world differently. HP
