Re: Campaign 2016 Part XXI: Do you love farce? My fault, I fear.
I don't think that's the compliment you think it is. They both have a habit of spewing hateful (but it's usually subtly hateful, so that's better?
) bs, ignoring when they are called on it, then repeating it a week or two later.
The only stuff I have read of Bob and joe that I would call hateful comes from their religious principles. I agree from our worldview their attitudes towards gays and abortion are homophobic and misogynistic, respectively. I agree that they should be kept as far from the levers of power and policy as possible.
But there are lots of kids in this sandbox and if we ostracize every one of them that doesn't pass our ideological litmus test it's going to get very lonely. Particularly now, as the real world influence of their attitudes wanes, it is incumbent on us, the victors in the culture war, to distinguish between people who championed icky causes out of genuine principle, animated by good process (albeit with bad results), and the hypocrites (the GOP apparatus) and the charlatans (the political religious right) who espoused them just as a path to power.
Our ideals are in large part autobiographical. What we do with them -- how we pursue them -- is a matter of character, but the ideals themselves are rarely anything other than the baggage stamps of our journey through life. Give me Bob's upbringing and I'm probably him, and vice versa. It is difficult enough to build bridges between people with conflicting biographies without going beyond the fact and assigning character traits to them. That way lies the demonization of The Other that we rightly rail against when it happens to us.
We can afford to be magnanimous. On culture, we're winning and we're only going to win more. Then in our dotage it's
we who will be the reactionaries, so let's teach our grandkids to be kind if only as a matter of self interest.
