So in addition to fending off right-wingers here on this site, I also do quite a bit of fending off via regular old e-mail. One group in particular for some reason decided to include me in all of their local right-wing clubhouse e-mails; I’ve come to know the guys, they’re musicians, I’ve downed a few beers with them. They’re nuts.
And all last week, the Alpha Winger of this particular group kept forwarding me stuff about Hillary and Norman Hsu. Look - scandal for Hillary! And as you know if you read this site, I’m not a fan of Hillary Clinton at all. I mean, she’s better than the chowderhead in the White House now, but only marginally. I don’t think she represents the break with his disastrous policies we desperately need. As much, I oppose the idea of a Clinton succeeding a Bush who succeeded a Clinton who succeeded a Bush. What is this - the royal families?
But the fact that I - I’m a liberal! - didn’t try to defend Hillary or Hsu simply did not compute.
“Your team is in trouble,” Alpha Winger wrote.
“My team.”
To the extent that the Democratic Party is “my team,” it is only becausee I believe that someone needs to act as a counterweight to the Republican Party. But more than that; my beef has never been primarily with the Republican Party itself; it has always been with the conservative movement, meaning the know-nothing Limbaugh-O’Reilly-Hannity types as well as culturally conservative extremists. I have no intense dislike for, say, Arlen Specter. Rick Santorum was another story, because the conservative movement was his constituency.
But if the Democratic Party thinks it can waltz in, replace the Leader with Hillary and continue along the same course - maybe a little kinder and gentler, you know, with Hillarycare helping us out with medical bills - that is not enough. I do not and would not support that. And if that is what Hillary/the Democratic Party does, they can go down in flames and I could care less.
This isn’t about teams. Except for right-wingers, it is about teams. It’s the usual binary thing; black-white, good-evil. The GOP and the “Democrat” Party. They have a hard time grasping that someone who might oppose them does not, as a matter of course, embrace the official “opposition.”
But unless the “opposition” is going to, you know, oppose - what’s the point?
