Rhetoric War
A friend of mine asked me the other day about how I felt about all this social security stuff. I hadn’t thought about it much, to be honest: except in extreme cases, if the President is for a policy I tend to me against it, simply because I know this President lies. all. the. time.
There are still Democrats who want to engage this administration on a policy level, to discuss what’s going wrong now and how we can fix it or make it work better. The temptation is great, especially if you think policy discussions are important and they matter. _And_ if you think, in typical liberal “marketplace of ideas” fashion, that a variety of well-defended arguments causes the best one to bubble up to the top.
Well, I wish we could sit around and have these discussions, too. You know, talk about how to improve Social Security, improve health care, take care of our children’s welfare and education. These are all important discussions and our society suffers greatly when no one is having a serious discussion about these things.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we can have these discussions any more. At least not as long as the right wing has chosen Democrats and liberals to be their cold-war Soviet surrogates. As long as we are being daily demonized by mainstream sources (who are then condemned as “liberal” because they don’t demonize us enough), we cannot have effective policy discussions. Any idea or position we have is tainted merely by its association to the Left, to the point where we are having to “repudiate every no-name left-wing loonbar”:http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_02_06_digbysblog_archive.html#110771052503210315 with access to pen and ink while the Right wing pretends suggesting “talking to Liberals using a baseball bat”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200410070004 is droll political humor.