Whether they’re talking about Democrats or Republicans, the punditocracy calls for candidates to move to the Right.
Moving Right
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
3 Comments. Leave new
You put your right foot in –
You take your right foot out –
You put your right foot in –
And you shake it all about –
You do the hokey-pokey….
Ted,
Part (perhaps the major part) or why the pundits do this is that the Left is simply too vague.
Seriously, let’s take a look at the Leftist agenda, and let’s do it by applying a simple example that pretty much gets it covered in a single swipe. The Leftists are after the sorts of things that the Original Hippie Jesus H. Christ was talking about: aiding the sick and the poor, visiting the ill, comforting the dying, all that sort of stuff. If you need it even shorter: Do what you would want done to you. When you take out the religious mumbo-jumbo, it’s a perfect recipe for what government should be doing. And the Left screws it up over and over and over.
The Left starts off with “No one should have to be afraid of getting ill and not being able to get adequate care.”
Compromise.
More compromise.
Still more compromise.
And it turns into “Well, if the Right will let us put the following suggestion — which is, of course, always open for negotiation — up to a vote, we’d like to suggest that perhaps the government should think about an eight cent tax on all people who make more than $50 million a year — that’s eight cents, not percent, so it’s literally only going to be less than a dime a year — so that we can raise a few hundred dollars to bury some pauper in an unmarked grave. Unless people have a problem with that.”
The Right starts off with “I already have a lot. More than most people in the whole history of the planet. And it still isn’t enough. So you have to give me more.”
No compromise.
Still no compromise.
A tiny amount of compromise that will be circumvented by tax loopholes, legal chicanery, or some other dirty trick.
I am reminded of P.J. O’Rourke’s line from several decades ago: The difference between a liberal and a Nazi? No one has fantasies about being raped by a liberal. The Left needs to start acting like something a little more forceful than a bath sponge.
It is fortunate that the line of political attitudes seems to be infinite ; otherwise one end of it would really be getting crowded, with all these «moves to the right». But when, instead of owning 40 % of the wealth in the US as is the situation today, the 1 % owns it all, how much room for further movement to the right will then exist ?…
Henri