Dukehorn: I would be the first to agree with your point about the Balkanization of American politics and arguing the extremes. I fall into this trap myself (and did so on this thread).
The problem I have is not with liberals, but left wingers. And, no, I am not categorizing them as moonbats or nutjobs, but I feel the threat is far more insidious. The Hate America First mentality that pervades the Daily Kos and Huffington Post is not only destructive, but weakens our resolve during those times we need it most.
You mention Clinton’s impeachment trial. Randomly ask 50 Americans what this was about, and nearly all will argue that it was over Bill getting a blowjob from Monica. But it wasn’t. It was over a sitting President, who was a trained attorney, attempting to suborn perjury. The invective from both sides, right and left, completely obscures this very important point.
Similar to that is the spew over Bush and the neocons. You hear terms like “war mongering” thrown about casually without any sort of reasoned discussion accompanying them. Both parties have become so adept at identity politics and wedge issues that they’ve forgotten the real issues confronting us. Or, as I’m sure someone like CONCHO would successfully argue, they haven’t forgotten at all. Rather, the Dems and Repubs have become virtually indistinguishable from one another, and have reduced the average American to a jingoistic, ill-informed rube with the attention span of a gnat.
I don’t think of a liberal in pejorative terms. To the contrary, I think liberalism is one of the things that made this country great. I also believe that an open dialogue between opposing points of view is what keeps a representative democracy dynamic. The latest iteration, which I do believe was as fueled by Clinton as it is by Bush, now favors an encroaching police state, constant foreign interventions and the pablum shoved down our throats by a complicit media (and, no, I don’t think its an accident that all of the major media players are owned by major corporations).
We’re so busy arguing over non-issues like gay marriage that we’ve completely missed the big picture. My grandma left Germany in 1935. She told me once that if Nazism ever came to America, it would be because we voted for it. Sadly, that remark seems eerily prescient.
