“What it is ain’t exactly clear,” to continue the line from Buffalo Springfield’s classic sixties tune. Marc Pascal’s recent post here at TMV about the “self-made hell of narcissism, greed, short-sightedness, arrogant ignorance, and an utter lack of a common civility or responsibility for our shared future” in which we find ourselves — largely as a result of decades of Republican and conservative antipathy to the notion of a shared public interest — certainly struck a chord in me.
At the same time, we have Democrats and liberals now doing Republicans’ work for them because, in their minds, health care reform legislation that we’ve been fighting to pass literally since Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency isn’t good enough to pass until it’s got everything in it that progressive activists want.
I didn’t imagine I was the only one who feels this way. But it did make me sit up a little straighter when I saw Andrew Sullivan suggesting that it may be time to move “from depression to rage,” quoting a reader who feels similarly, and whose communication to Sullivan “resonated” with yet a third person — Richard at The Peking Duck — who in turn pointed to a tirade by John Cole on precisely the same subject.
Something’s in the air. I just hope it infects Democratic voters in time to get them to the polls in Massachusetts to pull the lever for Martha Coakley.
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