Friday, April 13, 2007

Where can we find Bush love

Mark Kleiman wrote a simple and important post:

It used to be that my habit of reading Dan Drezner, John Cole, and Andrew Sullivan meant that I'd encounter opinions about George W. Bush more favorable than my own. Now you have to go deep into the wingnut fever swamps before you encounter anything but persistent Bush-bashing.


Add another one to the list --- Tom Maguire of Just One Minute is looking to find someone to talk him off of his first floor ledge:

" I have come to the end of the road - I can not begin to grasp the extent of this White House email debacle.....feel free to leave a link to anything that might help talk me off the window ledge here. (No hurry - the rain sort of suits my mood, and I am on the first floor)."

In a healthy political environment, individuals such as Tom Maguire and Andrew Sullivan should not be my consistent political allies. There should be a few issue based alliances, plenty of mutual indifference areas but significant, passionate and coherent disagreements on policies and values that are used to evaluate both policies and desired future outcomes.

However we are not in a healthy political environment. This poisoning of the body politic has provoked an immune response so that the emerging dominant coalition is the sane versus the insane. This coalition will be extremely beneficial to the Democratic Party in the short to medium run, but if this is the political discourse for the next half dozen election cycles than the self-correcting and limiting mechanisms of government and governance will be suspended, therefore increasing the probability of Democrats doing really, really, dumb things.

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