What am I Doing Next to This Republican?
Posted: May 19th, 2006, 12:35 pm
I've been reading a few different blogs ... and it's been interesting...
What am I Doing Next to This Republican?
by feebog
Wed May 17, 2006 at 03:34:10 PM PDT
In the second row no less! The Republican is Los Angeles city Councilman Greig Smith, and we are both sweating in our jackets and squirming in our hard seats in the overheated auditorium of Patrick Henry Middle School. We are here, along with several hundred other folks, to comment on the building of Regional High School number four in Granada Hills California. The sponser of this meeting is the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). And this Republican and I, whose national politics could not be further apart, are ready to rip into LAUSD.
There is an old saying, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Never believed in that old saw until now. But as I listen to Counciman Smith tear LAUSD a new one over their sloppy, inadequate Draft Enviornmental Impact Report, I come to realize something; us versus them depends on who "them" is. Smith gets a huge hand, an then it is my turn. I launch into a well rehearsed and meticulously researched attack on the traffic study contained in the DIER. And when I am done, I get an even bigger round of applause than Smith. As I sit down, he punches me on the leg and says "great".
Now I have little doubt that we will be able to turn back the hands of time and resurect the defunct hospital that LAUSD bought for this new high school. But I do think we can force LAUSD to create adequate parking on site, mitigate the traffic situatio with real solutions,and eliminate any suggestion of night school at the site.
It occurs to me that the little drama played out last night has national implications as well. How many Republicans are fed up with their party at this point? Based on recent polling, I would guess a shitload. So what are we doing in terms of identifying these folks and turning them into an US instead of a THEM?
It may be different strokes for differnt folks, but I have a few specific THEMS in mind. How about the Oil industry for starters? How about the super rich and their out of control tax cuts? How about companies who continue to knowingly hire undocumented workers? How about spy agencies that are listening in on our phone conversations? Fill in your own blank, I think there are plenty of THEMS we can identify. And I have no illusions that these conservative voters will stay in our fold. Unlike the elephant representing their party, the have short memories. But let us channel that anger into a common cause, at least for this election cycle and the next, and we may change over a few of thems to us.
Source:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/5/17/183410/303
here's a couple of Andrew Sullivan's recent blogs:
Source:
http://www.time.com/time/archive/previe ... 26,00.html
My Problem with Christianism
A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
May 15, 2006
Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.
The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.
And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.
I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?
Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.
What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?
So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 32,00.html
May 07, 2006
As time runs out, a kinder, gentler Bush emerges
Andrew Sullivan
Something a little embarrassing has been happening to George W Bush and Dick Cheney lately. They’ve been rumbled as closet softies. On two groups not exactly dear to the Republican base — illegal Hispanic immigrants and gay couples — the president and vice-president are quietly, privately tolerant, even sympathetic. And this news could prove devastating to their electoral fortunes.
The president, it turns out, loves Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal. As a resident, and subsequently governor, of Texas Bush had plenty of opportunity to witness the sacrifices and hardships some illegal Mexican migrants endure to grab onto the lowest rung of the American dream. He was also shrewd enough to realise that the Hispanic vote was going to explode in the years ahead and that the party they first identified with would do extremely well.
So Bush tried to meld a Hispanic base with his white, southern one. He did rather well for a while. One of his favourite campaign phrases was “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande”. He saw traditionalist, Catholic Latinos as a natural part of a socially conservative Republican party.
He has made good on his rhetoric, and is now backing a humane, comprehensive immigration bill in direct conflict with his own party’s base, which sees it as an amnesty for an illegal “invasion”. Bush has also talked the talk — literally. In New York City at the last Republican convention he rendered some of his acceptance speech in badly wrought Spanish.
Last Thursday he celebrated a memorable battle in Mexican history, the Cinco de Mayo, with his usual punctuality, a day early on May 4. He offered this up for good measure: “The ambassador de Mexico is with us today. Embajador, gracias, y tambien, mi amigo, the ambassador from the United States to Mexico, Antonio Garza.” In 2000 Bush even sang the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, according to reporter Kevin Phillips, an act his Republican base considers verging on treason.
Bush’s wife Laura is even more comfortable with the idea of America’s anthem being sung in a different tongue: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with singing it in Spanish. The point is it’s the United States’s national anthem. And what people want is it to be sung in a way that respects the United States and our culture. At the same time, we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of many, many languages.” Suddenly the gap between the president and his supporters looked as wide and as arid as the Rio Grande itself.
On gay couples the contrast is just as striking. Bush and Cheney endorsed a draconian measure against gay couples a few years ago. They supported an amendment to the federal constitution that would strip all legal protections from gay couples, repeal any state’s marriage laws, and eviscerate any civil partnerships.
And yet Cheney’s own daughter Mary is openly lesbian and has a long-standing girlfriend, Heather Poe. I bumped into them both a week ago at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and chatted amiably.
Mary has a book coming out. In it she tells how her gun-wielding, torture-approving, dark-side dad dealt with the revelation that his daughter was gay. He said, quite simply: “You’re my daughter, and I love you, and I just want you to be happy.”
He meant it; and they are, by all accounts, extremely close. For good measure Mary ran her father’s re-election campaign; and he was allowed to distance himself from the constitutional amendment in the campaign. And yet, at the same time he heads a party that would strip his daughter and her girlfriend of all legal rights.
Bush has had several gay friends in the past, and, according to them, has always been civil and open and accepting. In the 2000 election cycle a former aide, Doug Wead, secretly taped chats with Bush. On one occasion Bush was told he had to criticise gays as a way to curry favour with evangelicals. He retorted: “I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”
In Ronald Kessler’s new book on Laura Bush he recounts another incident when Bush invited his Yale classmates to their college reunion at the White House. One of his classmates was formerly Peter Akwai, a man who later had a sex change operation and became Leilani. When Akwai shook hands with the president, she said: “Hello, George, I guess the last time we spoke to each other, I was still living as a man.” Akwai described Bush’s response: “He grasped my hand firmly and said, ‘And now you’re you!’ ” Perfect.
What to make of this? On the one hand it’s good to know that these men are not personally bigoted or intolerant. On the other hand their alliance with elements that do consistently rail against illegal immigrants, Hispanics and gay people in ugly rhetorical broadsides is undeniable.
Does their personal tolerance make their policies less or more distasteful? I’d say more distasteful, since they know better. A man with a gay daughter in a loving relationship should not be campaigning on the idea that such relationships destroy the family. Whose family? Cheney’s?
To be fair the Bush-Cheney team has long been pro-immigrant; and their constitutional amendment on gay marriage has gone nowhere, although it’s being introduced into the Senate again next month. Their relationship with their own base is no more strained than that between, say, Tony Blair’s and his.
But in this there is also, perhaps, an emerging possibility. If the Democrats win back all or half the Congress this November Bush will have to deal with them. Can we say triangulation? He’ll have new allies to pass an immigration measure he can live with and take credit for; and more cover when the anti-gay forces recede.
We may get a kinder, gentler Bush yet. It’s there underneath. It’s just that it might take a Democratic Congress to bring it out of the closet.
And so on the National level Bush slides lower and lower in the polls, while on the local levels Democrates and Republicans sit next to each other working together towards from a shared vision on a common causes.
But let us channel that anger into a common cause, at least for this election cycle and the next, and we may change over a few of thems to us.
Yes, let's.... and the next cycle and next and ...
What am I Doing Next to This Republican?
by feebog
Wed May 17, 2006 at 03:34:10 PM PDT
In the second row no less! The Republican is Los Angeles city Councilman Greig Smith, and we are both sweating in our jackets and squirming in our hard seats in the overheated auditorium of Patrick Henry Middle School. We are here, along with several hundred other folks, to comment on the building of Regional High School number four in Granada Hills California. The sponser of this meeting is the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). And this Republican and I, whose national politics could not be further apart, are ready to rip into LAUSD.
There is an old saying, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Never believed in that old saw until now. But as I listen to Counciman Smith tear LAUSD a new one over their sloppy, inadequate Draft Enviornmental Impact Report, I come to realize something; us versus them depends on who "them" is. Smith gets a huge hand, an then it is my turn. I launch into a well rehearsed and meticulously researched attack on the traffic study contained in the DIER. And when I am done, I get an even bigger round of applause than Smith. As I sit down, he punches me on the leg and says "great".
Now I have little doubt that we will be able to turn back the hands of time and resurect the defunct hospital that LAUSD bought for this new high school. But I do think we can force LAUSD to create adequate parking on site, mitigate the traffic situatio with real solutions,and eliminate any suggestion of night school at the site.
It occurs to me that the little drama played out last night has national implications as well. How many Republicans are fed up with their party at this point? Based on recent polling, I would guess a shitload. So what are we doing in terms of identifying these folks and turning them into an US instead of a THEM?
It may be different strokes for differnt folks, but I have a few specific THEMS in mind. How about the Oil industry for starters? How about the super rich and their out of control tax cuts? How about companies who continue to knowingly hire undocumented workers? How about spy agencies that are listening in on our phone conversations? Fill in your own blank, I think there are plenty of THEMS we can identify. And I have no illusions that these conservative voters will stay in our fold. Unlike the elephant representing their party, the have short memories. But let us channel that anger into a common cause, at least for this election cycle and the next, and we may change over a few of thems to us.
Source:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/5/17/183410/303
he's right ...How many Republicans are fed up with their party at this point? Based on recent polling, I would guess a shitload. -- from above
here's a couple of Andrew Sullivan's recent blogs:
Source:
http://www.time.com/time/archive/previe ... 26,00.html
My Problem with Christianism
A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
May 15, 2006
Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.
The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.
And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.
I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?
Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.
What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?
So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.
Source:That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back. -- from above
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 32,00.html
May 07, 2006
As time runs out, a kinder, gentler Bush emerges
Andrew Sullivan
Something a little embarrassing has been happening to George W Bush and Dick Cheney lately. They’ve been rumbled as closet softies. On two groups not exactly dear to the Republican base — illegal Hispanic immigrants and gay couples — the president and vice-president are quietly, privately tolerant, even sympathetic. And this news could prove devastating to their electoral fortunes.
The president, it turns out, loves Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal. As a resident, and subsequently governor, of Texas Bush had plenty of opportunity to witness the sacrifices and hardships some illegal Mexican migrants endure to grab onto the lowest rung of the American dream. He was also shrewd enough to realise that the Hispanic vote was going to explode in the years ahead and that the party they first identified with would do extremely well.
So Bush tried to meld a Hispanic base with his white, southern one. He did rather well for a while. One of his favourite campaign phrases was “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande”. He saw traditionalist, Catholic Latinos as a natural part of a socially conservative Republican party.
He has made good on his rhetoric, and is now backing a humane, comprehensive immigration bill in direct conflict with his own party’s base, which sees it as an amnesty for an illegal “invasion”. Bush has also talked the talk — literally. In New York City at the last Republican convention he rendered some of his acceptance speech in badly wrought Spanish.
Last Thursday he celebrated a memorable battle in Mexican history, the Cinco de Mayo, with his usual punctuality, a day early on May 4. He offered this up for good measure: “The ambassador de Mexico is with us today. Embajador, gracias, y tambien, mi amigo, the ambassador from the United States to Mexico, Antonio Garza.” In 2000 Bush even sang the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, according to reporter Kevin Phillips, an act his Republican base considers verging on treason.
Bush’s wife Laura is even more comfortable with the idea of America’s anthem being sung in a different tongue: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with singing it in Spanish. The point is it’s the United States’s national anthem. And what people want is it to be sung in a way that respects the United States and our culture. At the same time, we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of many, many languages.” Suddenly the gap between the president and his supporters looked as wide and as arid as the Rio Grande itself.
On gay couples the contrast is just as striking. Bush and Cheney endorsed a draconian measure against gay couples a few years ago. They supported an amendment to the federal constitution that would strip all legal protections from gay couples, repeal any state’s marriage laws, and eviscerate any civil partnerships.
And yet Cheney’s own daughter Mary is openly lesbian and has a long-standing girlfriend, Heather Poe. I bumped into them both a week ago at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and chatted amiably.
Mary has a book coming out. In it she tells how her gun-wielding, torture-approving, dark-side dad dealt with the revelation that his daughter was gay. He said, quite simply: “You’re my daughter, and I love you, and I just want you to be happy.”
He meant it; and they are, by all accounts, extremely close. For good measure Mary ran her father’s re-election campaign; and he was allowed to distance himself from the constitutional amendment in the campaign. And yet, at the same time he heads a party that would strip his daughter and her girlfriend of all legal rights.
Bush has had several gay friends in the past, and, according to them, has always been civil and open and accepting. In the 2000 election cycle a former aide, Doug Wead, secretly taped chats with Bush. On one occasion Bush was told he had to criticise gays as a way to curry favour with evangelicals. He retorted: “I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”
In Ronald Kessler’s new book on Laura Bush he recounts another incident when Bush invited his Yale classmates to their college reunion at the White House. One of his classmates was formerly Peter Akwai, a man who later had a sex change operation and became Leilani. When Akwai shook hands with the president, she said: “Hello, George, I guess the last time we spoke to each other, I was still living as a man.” Akwai described Bush’s response: “He grasped my hand firmly and said, ‘And now you’re you!’ ” Perfect.
What to make of this? On the one hand it’s good to know that these men are not personally bigoted or intolerant. On the other hand their alliance with elements that do consistently rail against illegal immigrants, Hispanics and gay people in ugly rhetorical broadsides is undeniable.
Does their personal tolerance make their policies less or more distasteful? I’d say more distasteful, since they know better. A man with a gay daughter in a loving relationship should not be campaigning on the idea that such relationships destroy the family. Whose family? Cheney’s?
To be fair the Bush-Cheney team has long been pro-immigrant; and their constitutional amendment on gay marriage has gone nowhere, although it’s being introduced into the Senate again next month. Their relationship with their own base is no more strained than that between, say, Tony Blair’s and his.
But in this there is also, perhaps, an emerging possibility. If the Democrats win back all or half the Congress this November Bush will have to deal with them. Can we say triangulation? He’ll have new allies to pass an immigration measure he can live with and take credit for; and more cover when the anti-gay forces recede.
We may get a kinder, gentler Bush yet. It’s there underneath. It’s just that it might take a Democratic Congress to bring it out of the closet.
More distasteful, because they knew better -- oh yes, yes, yes.What to make of this? On the one hand it’s good to know that these men are not personally bigoted or intolerant. On the other hand their alliance with elements that do consistently rail against illegal immigrants, Hispanics and gay people in ugly rhetorical broadsides is undeniable.
Does their personal tolerance make their policies less or more distasteful? I’d say more distasteful, since they know better. - from above
And so on the National level Bush slides lower and lower in the polls, while on the local levels Democrates and Republicans sit next to each other working together towards from a shared vision on a common causes.
But let us channel that anger into a common cause, at least for this election cycle and the next, and we may change over a few of thems to us.
Yes, let's.... and the next cycle and next and ...