In The Daily Beast this week, writer Michael Tomasky insists that the GOP primary “is where ideas go to die.” In a rant for the ages, Tomasky laments the fact that forward-thinking Republicans like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul must give up their progressive ideas for standard ideologies to satisfy “the aging, white, very conservative, revanchist, fearful voter.”
According to Tomasky, this voter sees the primaries not as an opportunity to pick a candidate who can win, but rather as a “Parris Island-style ideological obstacle course on which each candidate must strain to outdo his competitors – the hate-on-immigrants wall climb, the gay-bashing rope climb, the death-to-the-moocher-class monkey bridge.”
You can almost see Tomasky’s righteous fury taking tangible shape above his keyboard as he slams home his moving declaration: “You can’t be a smart candidate in a party that wants to be stupid.”
Isn’t it nice when liberals presume to reach across the aisle to give advice to Republican voters? Hey, I stand for everything you hate and you stand for everything I hate, but here’s what I would recommend…change your positions so that they match mine! Right, that makes sense.
Of course, one can recognize the depth of Tomasky’s ethical fiber with little more than a passing glance. He apparently sees the primaries as a kind of political horse race, where voters should place bets instead of choosing with their conscience. The point of election day, in his view, is to see how many candidates you can get “right.” To vote for the ones that will probably win. Gee, if that’s all there is to it, maybe low turnout rates are not such a mystery after all.
The hate-on-immigrants wall climb. This is how liberals see conservative positions. They refuse to admit that there is any substance there at all. It requires so much less effort to just denounce all of them as being born out of some “fearful” bigotry that we would all be better off without. Besides, it’s the hate-on-illegals wall climb, get it right.
If the worst Republican primary voters can be accused of is holding strong opinions about what is best for America, that’s hardly a great shame. And if the best the left can do with that is to stomp and call those opinions “stupid,” then they must be running on an empty tank.
For Tomasky and his liberal colleagues in the media, the only good Republican ideas are the ones already championed by the left. The only ones that aren’t “stupid” are the ones already being pushed by the Obama administration. Don’t they wonder even for a moment at their own blindness?
No, of course they don’t. They want to publish pieces that will earn them a congratulatory pat on the back when they go back to the liberal lounge. You really showed ’em, Mike. You burned ’em good.
One might call such an approach to political commentary lazy. One might call it dishonest. Come to think of it, one might even call it fearful.
Comments are closed.