I'm going to avoid the whole "whatever happened to supporting the President no matter what?" theme that Blogtopia has been bandying about in reaction to the latest pathetic whining from the right:
So, President Obama phoned the Senate GOP sellouts Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter and praised them Friday night for showing their "patriotism" by cutting a trillion-dollar, backroom deal to mortgage our children and grandchildren's future.
If that is "patriotism," then I'm proud to be an unpatriot.
I should point out that Michelle Malkin is an American citizen through a loophole in the Constitution that allowed her mother to fly here, give birth, and have her daughter declared a "natural-born citizen." This is also known as having an "anchor baby," and allowed her parents, here on student visas, entree to American citizenship without going through the usual processes.
I'm sort of hoping she was a C-section, so that we could claim she wasn't born naturally, but a surgically delivered abomination and therefore deportable.
Which in no way should be construed as deprecating any other C-section births, of course. But I digress...
It would be easy to poke fun at these "sunshine patriots," as Thomas Paine put it. After anally-raping Uncle Sam for the past eight years in support of a President who couldn't spell "mandate" much less claim one, they now turn their backs on a country that so thoroughly repudiated them that their losing candidate, John McCain, couldn't claim as much voter support as the least palatable Democratic candidate since Michael Dukakis, John Kerry in 2004.
They are saying, as Eric Cartman would say, "Screw you guys, I'm going home!"
America, love it or leave it. One is tempted to say that to a group so ugly, brutish and vile that they contribute nothing to the national dialogue beyond foam and bluster.
And one might be wrong. I'm a liberal, so I guess that makes me tolerant. Here's what I think is happening.
The groundbreaking psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross devised the now famous "stages of grief" Kubler-Ross model in 1969. We can celebrate that accomplishment by analyzing the right wing reactions to November 4, 2008.
As the event approached, and the death of conservative became apparent, there was an awful lot of denial going on. Remember how Barack Obama was "clearly not an American citizen"? The outlandish extent to which conservatives attempted to prove his illegitimacy is called "denial" and was Kubler-Ross' first stage.
Indeed, this stage kept going right up to the final electoral college vote on December 12. Some people didn't get out of denial until the inauguration. And some, bless their stubborn little hearts, to this day claim he's illegitimate and not their President! How cute!
Anger, which is the next stage, is still pretty obvious, as any trip to any website where more than one conservaroach is infesting. Malkin's post about "unpatriot" makes that abundantly clear. Some have moved beyond this point however, so let's continue.
Bargaining: We've seen this in the Senate this week. I don't think it's a coincidence that the folks who have the most progressive outlook in the Republican party have begun to negotiate the waters of an Obama administration and an economic meltdown. If you've read carefully the statements politicians have put out this week, you've read words along the lines of "if only..."
"If only the stimulus bill had more tax cuts. If only the stimulus bill didn't cost so much."
That, my friends, is bargaining.
Next comes depression. We're going to start seeing that as the Obama stimulus bill begins to revive the economy. Make no mistake. It will. Even if President Obama opened a window and threw $800 billion onto Pennsylvania Avenue, some stimulus would occur. Obama knows this. The smart Republicans do too. They just don't like that it's a Democrat who, once again, gets to save the nation from the folly of the GOP.
And finally, acceptance. Now, I don't think we will ever see an en masse admission by Republicans that Barack Obama has done a fine job in turning the nation around. But it will be there in the dark shadows of the Republican psyche, a grudging acceptance that the nation chose wisely, as it sometimes is wont to do, particularly when the chips are down and we need the right man in office.
Until that day, thought, you can expect more of this.
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