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To our friends on the right: please grow up
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AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Since January the electorate has been inundated with the shrill cries from the pundits of the right wing. Not a day goes by without hearing some new complaint: foreigner, gay, Socialist, Marxist, Communist, baby killer. Obummer, Nobama, Oblahblah.
The list is so long as to resemble a Monty Python sketch. Meanwhile, the serious business of running this country is suffering while you are out to lunch.
Please grow up and join the rest of us at the adults table. Pretty please? With sugar on top?
Understand this: America is in a deep, deep hole. This is your country too. We have all heard how loudly you proclaim yourselves to be patriots. Now is the time to prove it. If you are to call yourselves Americans, now is the time for you to pick up a shovel, not sit on your backsides and whine. Nobody likes a whiner. Now is the time to grin and bear it. You lost. Elections have consequences. Better luck next time. Now please start digging with the rest of us.
This country is at its best when we have bright and thoughtful liberals and conservatives, debating their ideas in the public square. This process improves everything it touches. Sometimes the liberals win, sometimes the conservatives win, but everything is improved by this crucible. Of late, you are not doing your part. Of late, you represent little more than the five year old who is throwing a temper tantrum in the grocery store because his mommy refused to buy that box of fruityloopies.
It is time to grow up. Do you want the House and Senate back in 2010? Do you want the White House back in 2012? Now is the time to demonstrate to the Independents that you can be trusted with it. You will NOT do this by pushing Impeachment complaints. You will NOT do this by questioning the validity of President Obama's citizenship. These actions make you look like spoiled children -- regardless of their level of actual merit.
Independents are the new power brokers in the electorate. This is fortunate for you, because Independents will tend to vote for whoever presents the best argument; they will vote for whoever appears to be the best leader. However, your arguments of late are laughable and the credibility of your leadership is somewhere near Napoleon Bonaparte after the Battle of Waterloo. This might be bitter medicine indeed; please don't take offense. Realize that the landslide of voters leaving the Republican party in the last year proves this to be true. You can either cry in your coffee or get your act together.
The GOP is very nearly a thing of the past; the actions you take over the next few years will decide if you regain ascendancy or go the way of the Whigs and the Tories in American political history. The way things are going, you are guaranteed a ride to obscurity. Rather than working tirelessly to promote alternative solutions, your leadership is working tirelessly to obstruct solutions. When the vast majority of Americans polled say they want reforms in health care, your leadership champions the status quo.
Your leadership does not seem to grasp a simple fact: regardless of who is actually to blame for the fiascos of the last eight years, your party gets the blame, right or wrong. This means that the tried-and-true tactic of throwing garbage when you are not in power will only harm you. After catching the blame for messing up so badly, you need to be seen as contrite; you need to be seen as gladly helping out in any way you are allowed to. You need to be seen as accepting responsibility. Anything else makes you look like sore losers.
Smack your leadership upside their collective heads. Go camp out in their offices. Find some new leaders, or throw your own hat into the ring. Do something. Get a new plan, because the one you have now is not working.
The party you save just might be your own.
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