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A Modest Proposal for Left and Right
Courtesy of Megan McArdle:
While the progressives are shocked, shocked that Obama hasn’t made Bill Ayers attorney general and Ingrid Newkirk Secretary of Agriculture, many of the conservatives who were mad about my supporting Obama continue to assure me that he is making card check and confiscatory taxation the centerpiece of his administration. Maybe the hard conservatives and the progressives should be consoling each other.
Priceless.
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5 Responses to “A Modest Proposal for Left and Right”
The progressives are guilty of wanting too much change too soon, while the hard conservatives are guilty of paranoid raving. For another take on McArdle's piece:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2…
I think the left just needs to settle down. It's not like on January 21st, Obama will rip off his face and reveal that he's actually W's secret twin, or something. And they need to remember that hubris and pride and overpartisanship brought down the Republicans, and it can bring the Democrats down just as easily.
I am a progressive democrat. However, the far leftwing, the hard core ideologs are behaving just like the far rightwing ideologs and both are annoying. Both sides combined make up a very small portion of the parties or the voters and yet they make the most demands and screech the loudest.
I wish both wings would grow up.
Obama is smart by choosing bone and muscle on his team, not merely farther-left fluff and activists who would not only be destructive but ruin Obama's reputation.
Something I thought about last night is appropriate again today given the latest news about someone in Obama's old neighborhood, involving people with whom Obama has been involved, and which brings attention to the worst of the Left and the need by a sane Obama to avoid it. As to disparaging the right, the typical lie of the Left we have seen continuously since 1994 has been that uttered by liars like Dick Gephardt and Chris “Countrywide” Dodd, the Beet-Faced Brothers, that anyone not belonging to the farther Left or at least the “moderate” [sic] Democratic voting bloc is “extremist” [sic]. That kind of stuff is just stupidity to be added to the childishess of the farther left.
On to another example of a rational possible decision by Obama that may offend the activists:
The position of Secretary of Labor is itself a dinosaur, an oddity from an ancient time. It is as obsolete or more so than the Detroit-UAW decades-failed business and labor model.
While the Left stupidly attacks only management of the Detroit Three, and wants Rick Wagoner first and foremost to be removed (along with other stupid goals being pursued, such as environmentalist “business” objectives being demanded, and so on), at least one of the major four characters has a home.
Ron Gettelfinger is the most sensible and serious person Obama could name for Secretary of Labor. At least Ron Gettelfinger, I thought to myself last night, has a possible future home if or when the Detroit Three (and the UAW) eventually fail.
This might disappoint the wackier activists, who would want someone not merely from AFSCME (the one powerful union in the one place where unions remain substantial, namely in government), but someone from SEIU, or from the Change to Win organization, or an activist from ACORN to be secretary of labor — in other words, someone appealing to the militant farther left — but given Obama's taint from being around Chicago and the antics that are being exposed with Change to Win, among other subjects, associated with the arrest and indictment of Blagojevich, a dinosaur like Gettelfinger from the dinosaur UAW, an endangered species nearing extinction, is relatively sane. And after all, “Secretary of Labor” itself, and a Department of Labor, is a dinosaur, anyway.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/acrobat/200…
Again,
Obama is smart by choosing bone and muscle on his team, not merely farther-left fluff and activists who would not only be destructive but ruin Obama's reputation.