That's what separates the rational people from the fever swamps of the far left and right. This is how you accept defeat graciously, people.
Dave
Physics Geek
Wunderkraut
Bingley
CalTechGirl
Joel
I can't say it as well as they did, but Mr. President-Elect, you will be my President. I will support you when I should, I will oppose you when I have to, but I will not be a victim of ODS. Grow a brain, dummies.
Iz out!
2 months ago
13 comments:
Sorry, but a good loser is still a loser. If you convince yourself you don't mind losing, you lose the incentive to win. That's been the basic problem with the Stupid Party the last few election cycles. It forgot that (within the law) WINNING should always come first. The Evil Party never forgot that -- that's why its campaigns have been more energized and more successful.
This socialist bastard is not my president and never will be. May he fail in everything he attempts and leave office in four years as a broken man.
Wolfwalker, if you're American, he is your president. If you take the attitude that your last paragraph states, you're no better than the socialist bastard's party in its treatment of the current sitting president. Whether you voted for him or not, you cannot take that stance without sinking to the level of the Democratic party in its insistence that President Bush stole the elections in 2000 and 2004, therefore was not the legitimate president, and refusal to support his policies.
I didn't vote for him either. I have issues with the policies he's stated he'll have. However. He is the president. I will respect that, and support him, to the extent I can, now. To act otherwise is to legitimize the behavior of the Left for the past eight years.
He's my President as well. I am not happy about it, but this won't be the first time I had a leader whom I didn't respect, but supported on at least issues that needed my support.
I stand with hh on this. I'll fight Obama on legitimate policy issues but I'm not going to sink to the depths of the nutroots. They have manufactured a reality in which they could indulge in all of those vile fantasies because Bush and a lot of other people were around to deal with the real world. Now they are going to have to deal with the world as it is, and I would give that a chance to sink in instead of rushing to jump in the gutter. It's a miserable way to live anyway.sylleo
Oh, and thanks for the link, Ken.
What everyone but wolfwalker said, I second.
I keep saying and I'll say it until the discourse changes: We cannot hold ourselves to a higher standard than the people we've criticized if we act just like them.
Please, fight the good fight. Just do it the right way. Cheerful opposition, as Nightfly would say.
Cullen, even if I disagreed with much (but not all) of his politics, I've always liked the description of Hubert Humphrey as "The Happy Warrior".
WW, accepting defeat graciously doesn't mean acquiescence. It doesn't mean refusing to oppose misguided policies. It means picking yourself up and preparing for the next contest. I hope to have another post on this later.
hh, I am and always will be an American. This socialist bastard, however, is not. That's why he'll never be my president.
If you support parts of his agenda in hopes of getting support from him for any part of your agenda, you're a chump. The Evil Party and its minions don't work that way.
If you support any part of his agenda and claim you're doing it "because it's the right thing to do," you still weaken your ability to oppose him on the next item, because that's the way the human mind works. "He was right on that point ... am I really so sure he's not also right on this point?" Your opposition gets chipped away bit by bit, and one day you wake up to realize you're supporting policies that run diametrically opposite to everything you've believed for your entire life.
None of that for me, thanks. He's a socialist, transnationalist, aggressor-appeasing bastard. I will do nothing that helps him to achieve that goal.
As for demonstrating that "we're better people than that" -- people, if that mattered to the voters, the Evil Party wouldn't have won a single state on Tuesday. History proves that when you behave nicely toward an aggressor, hoping to convince them to act nicely toward you, your hopes are ALWAYS disappointed. Well, the Evil Party area exactly that: aggressors attacking the American way of life. Give them an inch, they'll take a light-year. Try to negotiate with them, and pretty soon you'll find that their idea of negotiation is the same as extremists of any other stripe: "we get everything we want, and you get nothing you want." That isn't compromise, it's surrender.
WW, I think you're still missing our point.
Accepting defeat in one election does not mean acceptance of his agenda. We do not have to accept the agenda or any part of it.
But that doesn't mean we can't support him when he is right. If he chooses to embrace free market principles (not likely, I know), I will support that. If he chooses to acknowledge that we are at war with radical Islam, and to fight it appropriately, I will support him. If he does otherwise, I will oppose him.
But what I will not do is undermine him to the detriment of the country, simply because I dislike him or his (previously professed) policies. I will give him a chance and support or oppose on his actions. He may be a socialist, but if he doesn't actually act like one I will be happy.
WW, I think you're still missing our point.
Oh, I understand your point quite well. A few years ago, I even would have agreed with it, and argued aggressively against people who expressed the kind of sentiments I'm expressing right now, here and elsewhere. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," that's what I would have said.
But events of the last decade or so have shown me, in grueling detail, that I was wrong. Now my rule is "Do unto others what they have already proven they're willing to do unto you." I'll be fair with those who are fair to me. To those who treat me as an enemy, a thing to be destroyed or imprisoned, I will show no mercy.
The Democratic Party calls me an enemy to be destroyed. Therefore, I do the same to it. I won't do or say anything that suggests I can be abused into cooperation with a force I believe to be as evil as the Dark Lord of Mordor. I won't lift a finger to help this president, his party, or his policies. I won't say a word that even might be construed as supporting him, not on any subject, not for any reason. He is not my president and never will be.
"This socialist bastard is not my president and never will be. May he fail in everything he attempts and leave office in four years as a broken man."
If that happens, there won't be a country in four years. We'll all be dead. Every single one of us. Grow up: this shit is far more deadly serious than the majority of voters on either side treated it as.
When the crisis comes to "test" Obama that Joe Biden talked about, and it will, and soon--and I predict involving nukes, Iran, and Israel--I do not want Obama to fail.
What Dave J. said.
I also don't want things to get so bad that we split as a country - either into two coastal pieces vs. a middle, or north vs. south, or industrialized areas vs. "information economy" areas or whatever. I want us to remain united. I want us to have some hope of working together in the future without distrust of someone who voted differently from you, without having to make rude remarks about those from other parties. I'm ready to be done with the "Republicans are stupid" and "Democrats are crooks" meme.
(Granted, some members of each party - perhaps even some elected officials of each party - are either stupid, crooked, or both, but you can't use them to generalize about the entire party.)
Exactly, Ricki and Dave. The last time the populace lost confidence in the system as bad as it looks like ours possibly could was 1861, the beginning of the bloodiest, most terrible war in American history. I don't want to live to see my country torn apart by civil war. That's why I support the office of the president, if not the man sitting in that office.
I wrote about it in a bit more detail Friday on my blog, the anti-soma.
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