This week Arianna Huffington made an absolutely compelling argument in the HuffPo for why Vice President Joe Biden should resign his office.

In brief, Arianna argued that since Biden has become the most vocal opponent of increasing our military presence in Afghanistan he should, therefore, resign his office in protest if President Obama increases {as he just did} the size of our military in that nation.

Her piece got me thinking about an issue concerning the left vs. the right — and apparently it got other bloggers thinking the same things — because I started to take stock of how the political left in the Democratic Party has routinely held Obama’s feet to the fire when it came to promises made and promises kept {or unkept} since his election versus the manner in which the right treated George W. Bush during his presidency.

I mean think about it — the guy has been in office less than a year and we’ve got people within the ranks of the Democratic Party screaming at him about FISA, about DADT, about DOMA, about the bail-out, about health care and the auto industry etc, etc.

Compare and contrast the first five years of the Bush regime if you will, where from the right you got. . .

. . . the sound of crickets that’s what you fucking got.

But once that fuckwitted faux Texan clown was out of office all the douchebags high and low who silently and not so silently supported every fucking thing he did during his disastrously failed presidency couldn’t fucking turn on him fast enough — claiming he wasn’t a real conservative blah blah fucking blah.

About the only conservative during the early years to offer up any real criticism was Andrew Sullivan — and it took practically a Saul on the road to Damscus moment for that to happen and smack Sully upside his fat fucking head.  And yet, when it did, what was the response from his conservative peers?

I’ll tell you what their response was, they fucking excommunicated the old barebacker, that’s what.

Sully went from being a leading light and major voice of the conservative movement to. . . horror of horrors. . . a liberal.  At least he was a liberal if you listened to his former fellow travelers in the conservative boys club describe him.

But the reality was that Sully was just being a patriotic {non}citizen when he questioned the policies of The Leader.

As Glennzilla points out, it wasn’t until five years into the Bush Interregnum, during the Harriet Myers fiasco, that republicans bothered to raise even the faintest whiff of criticism of The Leader.

And it wasn’t until 2006, when the GOP lost control of congress, that blowhard, scumbag drug addict and pedophile sexual tourist Rush Limbaugh famously said, ”I feel liberated. . . I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried.”

Think about that!  Here is a guy who for years used his radio and tee vee platform to accuse those of us who disagreed with The Leader of being terrorist sympathizers and traitors and who used that same media megaphone at his disposal to support every single issue and initiative of the Bush administration and the congressional GOP who were abetting the president’s actions, admitting publicly that he put his party ahead of his country.

For what else can one take away from a statement such as that? If he doesn’t believe that certain people in the GOP adhered to his principals for how our American leaders should comport themselves in their jobs, if he felt that he was simply carrying water for people in whom he didn’t believe or for policies that he disagreed with simply for the sake of political expediency,  then what he was doing was, quite simply, putting his party before his country .

And every single republican, from the highest to the lowest who behaved in the same manner as Rush and who went along with The Leader and his enablers in congress because they put their party first were nothing more than hypocritical political opportunists and lickspittles who wrecked the republican party and almost wrecked this country.

Glennzilla astutely observes — avoiding that would have been so easy for so many people because all they needed to do was to act like responsible citizens and not like fanboys or party apparatchiks, mindlessly agreeing to whatever The Leader wanted.

Seriously, think about it — and heres a simple hypothetical — if it were George W. Bush who had won the Nobel Peace Prize do you think anyone on the right would have written as savage a criticism of that award as Matt Taibbi did from the left.  I guaranfuckingtee you would not. Everybody on the right would have circled the wagons in support of the award, bending over backwards to explain why it was so well deserved.

And that my friends is the difference between who we are and who they are.

We Democrats may seem {and frequently are} messy and argumentative, and our way of comporting ourselves may make the Democratic Party seem like an ungovernable beast with many heads when we argue from the left, right and center with our party leaders and take them publicly to task for their failures and idiocies.  And when we do you’ll see our opponents on the right nod their heads knowingly and say, “See, I knew your infatuation with Obama, or candidate A, or fill in the blank wouldn’t last you guys are so undisciplined.”

But when they say that they just demonstrate their complete and utter cluelessness because when you see us behave in that manner what you are actually seeing are citizens performing their duty as citizens — questioning our party leaders and challenging them when they need to be challenged.

Sure, we do argue amongst ourselves.  AND we have shills and sycophants within the party. But lets face it, nobody does shills and sycophants quite like the GOP and its enablers — and when I say enablers I’m speaking of its rank and file, its voters in other words.

Frankly Scarlett, I’ll take the messiness and argumentativeness of my Democratic Party every day of the week over the mindless obeisance and inability to understand the difference between campaigning and governing that is the hallmark of the modern GOP.  A hallmark that has resulted in the catastrophe of the republican party being driven into the sewer that it finds itself squatting and beshitted in today.

And that’s how we’re different than them.

Scott

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 9:05 am and is filed under Deep Thought, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.