Passing for Wisdom
Now thank God for the media
for saving the day
putting it all into perspective
in a responsible way.
(The Offspring, Stuff is Messed Up)
One always hopes that someone given a weekly column in a respected news magazine would be wise, or at least would aspire to wisdom. Alas, many of those who actually have such columns are more than happy to play stupid semantic games with their readers. Jon Meacham of Newsweek has shown that he is no exception. A recent column on bipartisanship actually starts off well.
That is why the sooner the political conversation takes into account the fact that there has never—never—been a golden age of bipartisanship, the better. There have been, it is true, eras in which there was more rather than less cooperation across party lines, but rival forces have always tried to destabilize one another.
One could argue that The Era of Good Feelings from 1817 to 1825, when there was only one viable national political party, was an exception, but even then there were important regional issues (four men fought fairly hard for the Democratic-Republican nomination in 1820, for example) and the issue of slavery was the cause of a great deal of political infighting. But I digress.
Alas, Meacham forgets that partisanship need not be a bad thing. In real life, partisanship, yea, even vociferous partisanship, is the only sane course of action.
Words have consequences, too. I wish that more liberals had appreciated this point during the George W. Bush years. It was wrong then to demonize the president, and it is wrong now....
I would argue that the 1980s were manageably mad in political terms. Liberals went crazy decrying Ronald Reagan, who was said to be a nuclear cowboy who hated the poor. Enough Americans, however, found Reagan to be a good man with whom they might disagree on particulars but whose essential character was worthy....
Reagan may or may not have been a "good man" but a huge number of his policies were borderline insane—his economic policies hobbled the federal government for a generation; his defense policies wasted hundreds of billions of dollars for absolutely useless missile defense systems; and his international policies included incredibly stupid and blatant violations of international law.
As for the first excerpt, when your administration treats prisoners in the way that the human monsters who ran the Inquisition in centuries past or the Soviet gulags in the last century would have treated them, then you certainly deserve the moniker demon. That the Bush administration is not seen by people like Meacham as morally repugnant says a lot about what opinion-makers in America are willing to overlook for the sake of cultivating sources and pleasing the powerful. Demons come in more than one form.
Labels: bipartisanship, demonizing, Jon Meacham, stupid publishing tricks
