A touch of Miers zeitgeist

  • I hes­i­tate to say much more about my dis­ap­point­ment over Bush’s Miers nom­i­na­tion, because I think my more detached friends are about to chuck me under the chin and say, “Buck up, sweet pea,” or some­thing like that. They aren’t nec­es­sar­ily less con­ser­v­a­tive than I am, but they just don’t let any of this stuff bug them. I have already won­dered a time or two if I shouldn’t emu­late them, but I gave up and fig­ured that the world needs all types. But I wish I wasn’t my type right now. It would be eas­ier their way. I wouldn’t care. It’s all just a show, right? Besides, lib­er­als have to be doing the happy dance to see Bush’s sup­port on the right flag­ging.

    Some death wish made me want to check that out, so I went over to the lefty blog site Daily Kos. And as if things weren’t bad enough, I have to read this lib­eral blog­ger show more astute skills of appraisal than our sup­pos­edly con­ser­v­a­tive president:

    Con­ser­v­a­tives don’t want to remain in the closet, … They want their … agenda shouted from the rooftops, celebrated, …

    Okay, I had to edit that a lot to get the hit-piece men­tal­ity out of it, but the basic point is accu­rate. And though the com­menters are always at least half insane, a few of them even got it right. (Make that “cor­rect.” None of them ever get any­thing “right.”):

    • …They don’t want to be in the closet, sup­port­ing “stealth nominees.”
    • Hon­estly I sym­pa­thize with them. Their lead­ers are whacked out cultists, but for a lot of evan­gel­i­cals they do gen­uinely feel the way they do – as lib­er­als feel about their issues. And they have worked damn hard over the last 40 years to get to this point.
    • Soc­cer anal­ogy: they want to run around barech­ested waiv­ing their shirts and then have a big pile in the mid­dle of the field.

    Well, okay, maybe not that last one. I don’t want to waive my shirt. Or even wave my shirt. (Hey, how much can you expect from a pub­lic school edu­ca­tion?) And it’s inter­est­ing that they appar­ently needed to exag­ger­ate our desire just to go nyah-nyah-nyah in their faces almost as much as they needed to rhyth­mi­cally repeat their deeply held con­vic­tion that there are LOTS of them and only a trou­ble­some few of us.

    Still, they under­stood what the GOP doesn’t seem to be able to under­stand — we don’t want to keep run­ning away from this fight. The cul­tural war is already on, for good­ness’ sake. It has been for most of my life­time. And con­ser­v­a­tives have been in steady retreat almost all that time. A few tec­tonic plates have shifted in the past decade or so that actu­ally have slowed the soul-destroying advance of lib­er­al­ism (which is all it has taken to send the wack­ier ones on the fringe into a per­pet­ual whirr of ter­ror). I don’t think there’s any­one on our side who actu­ally thinks we’ll win the bat­tle in the long run, which is why all that empha­sis on how much we’re going to dance on their graves really says more about their men­tal­ity than ours. (It makes me won­der how much of this has been dis­tilled down into a purely com­pet­i­tive sport for the more rabid of them.)

    So I know that it’s a dumb thing. I know that I’m silly for let­ting it change my mind. But I feel the need to fall back and regroup, at least as far as think­ing that Repub­li­cans can get the point of all this. Appar­ently, when push comes to shove, they can nei­ther push nor shove. They can only be politi­cians who want to appeal to cul­tural inter­ests that utterly loathe and reject them. Our next pres­i­dent will prob­a­bly be unspec­tac­u­lar, whether he/she is GOP or Dem. Looks like the bat­tle­ground of the war is about ready to shift again. Intel­li­gent, active Chris­t­ian voices can’t be heard in the courts, the media or in the polit­i­cal spec­trum. Not sure where we go from here, but I bet I won’t have to wait too long to find out.


    Related posts:

    1. Bush nom­i­nated … who now?
    2. More on Miers
    3. Howard speaks
    4. Blog bag for today
    5. Are hur­ri­canes racist?

    October 10th, 2005 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Fr Joseph Huneycutt 10.10.2005

    In the movie “Pirates of the Car­ribean,” dur­ing the ini­tial sword fight, Cap­tain Jack Sparks is accused of cheat­ing … quite quickly he responds: “Pirate.”

    That’s my favorite line.

    But I hate that line when it’s para­phrased by Bush & Company.

    It goes some­thing like this … there’s a bat­tle going on, some­thin nutty hap­pens, every sane per­son cries “foul” … and Bush says: “God.”

    Even Alfred E. New­man is start­ing to get worried.

  • Grace

    A wor­ried Alfred E. New­man? The sign of the end times for sure!

    Bush has been a very dif­fi­cult guy for much of any­body to get a han­dle on. I’m glad to note that his own per­sonal faith, by all accounts (espe­cially those of the media who see it as a sign of him being a dan­ger­ous moron) is real enough. And I’ve been amazed that he could nego­ti­ate his way through waters so thor­oughly infested with alli­ga­tors. But nei­ther his per­sonal faith nor his thick skin has seemed to help him at times. I don’t know why he would’ve made an appoint­ment like this and NOT known that it wouldn’t go well. I don’t think he’s as stu­pid as oth­ers say he is — he almost seems unbe­liev­ably naive.

    But as I said, in the long run, it’s prob­a­bly just as well I stop being *quite* such a cheer­leader for the GOP. Not that I won’t vote straight Repub­li­can in every elec­tion from dog­catcher to Grand Vizier for the next mil­len­nium, but that’s just because it ticks off lib­er­als sooooo much. ;-)

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