So I had to file the column before I knew what the election results would be, and rest assured next week’s installment of Inside Athenae’s Offline Brain will consist of nothing but the words “whoo” and “pwned,” but given all the bipartisan jibber-jabber going around yesterday, here’swhat I think of all that horseshit:
There’s plenty going on in America today that deserves to be talked about in partisan terms and talked about with the passion due its importance. Six years of near-unfettered Republican rule have brought this country to this point — mired in an unpopular war, shortchanging our military, secretly detaining our own, purporting to fight terrorism but spending far more time fighting gays. People who are angry about this state of affairs aren’t being partisan — they’re being awake.
If people vote against aid to Katrina victims, as 11 Republican members of Congress did a year ago, they deserve to be called heartless. If people aim to gut Social Security, as the Bush administration has done, they deserve to be called thieves. If people call war heroes lying cowards and grieving parents media whores, they deserve every name the English language can invent for them and a few borrowed from Latin as well.
If a president describes months of mayhem in Iraq as a mere “comma” in that nation’s history, he should be denounced in the strongest terms.
If career politicians find that too rough-and-tumble for their delicate sensibilities, they should seek employment elsewhere, in a job that doesn’t require that which they clearly believe to be beneath them.
A.