This editorial has stuck with me for several days, so I'm going to post some of it. It contains an idea we need to remember, in order to confidently confront those who want to slam liberals' solutions to problems and ability to lead.
The truth, when we can get past all of the RW propaganda being spread throughout this nation constantly, is that it is they, the conservatives, are incompetent and their ideas just don't work!
...The myth of conservative competence persists as uncontested verity, allowing George Schultz to sigh in public relief, post–9/11, “Aren’t we lucky the adults are in charge?” and New York Times columnist David Brooks to froth recently, concerning the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, that “I love thee with the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach,” because Roberts was what the headline called “A Competent Conservative”—a “practitioner,” Brooks said, instead of a “theoretician,” “the sort of person who rises when a movement is mature and running things.”
Except that the opposite is true. The longer the conservatives have run things, the less mature—and more ideological, theoretical, and divorced from practicality—they have shown themselves to be. An unheralded ground shift of modern American governance is the great do-si-do of left and right in their devotion to core competence. The right has abandoned common sense in favor of ideologically driven utopianism, while governing liberals have become the get-it-done, incremental pragmatists. They have proved effective not only in forwarding such progressive pet causes as the environment and racial and gender equity; if you want to lower abortion rates, shore up the family, improve student performance, reduce violent crime, achieve energy independence, support small business, strengthen the economy, ratchet down the deficit and the flow of illegal drugs, as most conservatives say they do, you’ll have a hard time voting for the current crop of conservatives. They don’t know what they’re doing.
President Bush, it is said, has escaped his comeuppance on this score because there’s a war on. But in truth, it’s his war and going badly. The strategic acumen of his defense team makes the Give-Peace-a-Chance crowd look downright Clausewitzian by comparison. I recall marching in a 2003 rally against invading Iraq behind a group of women whose organizational name (not to mention its acronym)—Ladies Against Boys Invading Anything— bespoke a less-than-serious matriculation in martial matters. Yet their forecast for the coming debacle was as dead-on accurate as the administration’s was wishful.
The damage from all this goes deep. The ongoing spectacle of Frick and Frack Run a Country has already imploded our politics. Defending a Potemkin pragmatism has required greater and greater displays of belligerence. The realpolitik formula that effectiveness requires occasional brutality has degenerated into its decadent approximation, that brutality is all that’s required in order to appear effective. But shock and awe failed, and now the administration is shoring up its credibility by questioning its critics’ patriotism and smearing truth tellers. Dangerously, it has learned to prosper by making mistakes. (The Bush team is incompetent at governing, not politicking—or, to put it another way, it’s accomplished at protecting its own welfare while neglecting that of the nation.) It’s an ironic side effect of the myth of conservative competence: the more the right’s mis-stewardship imperils the country’s fortunes, the more the country turns to the right for rescue...
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/ednote/2005/09/ednote.html
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