Can the United States Ever Be United Again?
May 11th, 2011 | 11 responses
So much for our new era of national unity.
When Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in Arizona, the pundits and political class predicted that it might be a turning point in political dialogue, ushering in a new era of civility. That lasted almost a week
But that was comparatively impressive: the killing of mass murderer Osama bin Laden on Sunday May 1 sparked pronouncements from talking heads about Americans being united again in a cathartic event.
That lasted about a day. Or less.
Can we enter the brevity of that national unity in the Guinness Book of World Records?
The sharp polarization and outright joy many Americans experience when badmouthing the party they don’t belong to and making unfounded accusations was nowhere more evident than on talk radio shows. I know because Sunday May 1 through Wednesday May 3 I drove roundtrip from San Diego, CA to Pinole, CA and monitored local and national AM talk radio for 19 hours.
Donald Trump: can I borrow your straight jacket?
It would be harder for the CIA to find liberal talk shows than bin Laden, but some do exist. Liberal talkers invariably did verbal high fives about the fact a Democratic President caught bin Laden, virtually rubbing it in the faces of Republicans that “their” President caught bin Laden.
In Conservative Talkland, hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage initially acknowledged and praised Obama’s role. But by Tuesday most conservative talk show hosts and callers were insinuating that the non-release of the bin Laden photos and changing White House accounts of the killing meant the government was lying, Obama staged it to boost his poll numbers and that congratulations really belonged to George Bush. Bin Laden’s timely exit became a mere side issue.
Republican bigwigs maintained the drumbeat. The New York Daily News reported that George W. Bush was more POUT-US than POTUS, turning down going with Obama to Ground Zero because he felt he Obama hadn’t given his administration enough credit. Several GOPers suggested their administration’s info really turned the tide and, man, oh, man didn’t that water boarding pay off. Experts strongly disagreed.
Any day now you expect former Bush administration officials to say that if Obama got bin Laden in Abbottabad well, then, they spotted him first in Costelloabad.
The truth? If you compare Bush’s reaction to reports of bin Laden in Tora Bora and Obama’s response to more uncertain info that bin Laden was holed up in a neighborhood in Pakistan, when the “3 o’clock in the morning call” came Bush overslept and Obama responded.
GO HERE to read the rest.
11 Responses to “Can the United States Ever Be United Again?”
I suspect the United States was never really united. Cable “news” and talk radio has simply made the polarization more visible.
You would have to agree that it is hard to unite Americans when the president is in front of a virtually all Hispanic audience in a city with virtually no whites and is proposing a plan to demogrpahically overwhelm whites is poor, uneducated Hispanics who is demand lots of government services, pay little in taxes, and will automatically vote for Democrats.
Why would anyone believe that Americans would be united at a time when politicians are pushing for their extinction?
I read the entire article and there is a little bit of hope offered at the end. My take is that it’s inconsistent that on the one hand the lack of unity and civility is decried, but on the other TMV continues to publish articles that widen that divide. With the likes of Michael Reagan on the one hand and the in-house stable of mostly Democrats on the other, the prevailing theme is not unity but just the opposite.
There are a few authors here that try to bridge the gap, but they are in the minority.
“Why would anyone believe that Americans would be united at a time when politicians are pushing for their extinction?”
I assume the writer is referring to those “real” Americans
Even if all Americans were white, this is still a bigoted, ignorant, preposterous comment
SD Hows that remake of Birth of a Nation going? those dirty brown people…
The problem with analyzing immigration reform in terns of either party is an entire waste of time because both parties do not want to solve the problem, they merely wish to gain an advantage from it. Prior to yesterday’s speech, Tom Tancredo on CNN I think, called this a con job because it lacked a comprehensive E-verify component that blocked illegal workers from working here. We see the same dynamic used here as we did at the start of the war on drugs. Sweeps picking up “users” makes for law and order ammunition in the polls, but while we have a few “king pins” ala Tyson chicken et al, the companies who make the profits from substandard wages and dangerous working conditions largely go untouched.
E-verify is the applied technology that would make such hypocrisy impossible, but the fact that neither party will provide the funding and management needed to register and monitor workplace compliance. Illegals are willing to take less and companies are willing to make more because the scarecrow of E-verify is left a husk of control that both sides hide behind.
Illegals come for work and if E-verify was potently administered, many workers would return to their homes because the jobs would not be found. If companies were hammered with penalties strong enough to make them not consider the risk worth the potential profit. You don’t have to turn people back if they don’t come.
Having said that, the other side is what to do with the 11 million who have lived here for years? Many illegals have lived here their entire adult life and have contributed to our country’s success. The Republicans say kick em out and the Democrats say let them stay, and both parties adopt do nothing attitude except at this sound byte level where nothing is fixed and everybody can stroke their bases accordingly.
As long as each side exclusively blames the other side, not really.
I am not sure that is exactly what we are seeing here. The comprehensive plan that Obama is proposing is very similar to the one Bush proposed when he was president. It is the riff in the Republican party that stopped reform in the Bush years, not a Democrat-Republican one. The establishment Republican party has always supported increased immigration, legal and illegal. It is part of their policies to suppress wages in this country. It always has been. They were the ones who, in Reagan’s immigration reform bill in the 1980′s, pushed to make it almost impossible to prosecute employers who hired illegals.
There isn’t anyone else in the country who believes that uncontrolled illegal immigration is desirable. Especially the Democrats, who get much of their support from labor unions, who oppose all excessive immigration, illegal and legal alike. Pay attention the next time expansion of the H1B visa program is debated. See who votes for this expanded immigration and who votes against it.
It seems to be such a struggle for many folks to entertain the possiblity that our divide isn’t simply the result of two camps equally motivated toward polarization, but instead is the product of one camp which has fostered and encouraged the polarization for decades and another which has been forced to react for decades. False memes can gain popularity for several reasons – endless parroting, laziness, reluctance to ruffle feathers, etc. – but in the end they are still false. Sadly, that isn’t enough to change minds when they are fixed. It’s easy to identify issues that divide people, but that identification should be a first step toward finding solutions, not an end in itself. As the saying goes: “It take two to tango”. I submit that it only takes one to trip them both up.
I realize that my post was not an answer to the OP. I have thought a lot about the OP’s theme and as an act of pertinence I wrote a post directed to it.
Almost everything I see talking about the huge partisan divide in this country is wide of the mark.
The politicians are following the wishes of the public more than we, the public, care to admit. And certainly more than they did 40 years ago. There are daily polls about virtually every subject being discussed. The politicians follow the polls closely, even when it forces them to do the illogical, such as refusing to raise the debt ceiling. There is really a vacuum of leadership among our elected politicians. It is a matter of following from the front
It is the public that is inconstant, unable to reach a conclusion about anything. It is the public that gets its opinions from disk jockeys, game and other entertainment show hosts who are where they are because of their good looks and pleasing voices.
Also the idea that we are suffering from a wide ideological split is wrong too. We have never been closer together in ideology, at least in my lifetime of sixty years. Certainly we are compared to the 1960′s through the 1980′s in the US or anytime compared to Europe. In fact this maybe the source of our discord, where the two parties have to manufacture differences to hide the fact we are in such a narrow right of center band of thinking. It may also be why we have so much trouble finding workable solutions, we are exploring too narrow of a range of options.
This also explains why the Republicans had to move further right when Obama was elected; to put some distance between themselves and Obama. To the point that they were usually left opposing policies their candidates ran on in 2008!
merkin,
This is what happens when one party acquiesces to the destruction of their organizational base of support for half a century…
Once Unions were sufficiently weakened, where else could the Democrats get financial support other than with Business & the Wealthy…
Identity politics can only take you so far…