Karl Rove and George Bush and Dick Cheney will have many disastrous legacies, but one of the most despicable and enduring will be how they used fear to deeply and deliberately divide our country
I don’t think that it really does. The author is sort of famous and stuff but I prefer to ignore the politics of certain classes of people (ie. entertainers or artists) if at all possible.
But it makes my fingers itch, and I just want to go leave a comment where I found this and point out that the *division* started before Rove or Bush or Cheney were actually in power. The *division* started when Gore deliberately and purposefully decided that public confidence in the *process* was less important than a chance of him winning and deliberately and purposefully decided to undermine and destroy public confidence in the democratic process.
And it went on, before 9-11 and any issues of “fear”, as those buying into the whole “he stole the election” thing demanded that Bush carry on a Democrat agenda (because he didn’t *really* win) and that Bush ought to tell those Republicans who might think he owed *them* a Republican agenda, to shove it. Do you remember this pre-9/11 attitude? I sure do.
There never was any “meet in the middle”. There never was any bi-partisanship. And blaming that on Bush and Cheney and Rove is just a wee bit obtuse.
If we want to find blame for the deliberate division of our country (not that it’s a particularly *new* thing) perhaps we ought to look to those who made outright opposition to the administration a party loyalty test and threw out (or tried to) those who didn’t turn against the decisions they had participated in and approved of once the initial hot feeling from 9-11 was over.
Utterly refusing to participate and then stomping and howling that it’s all the the other guy’s fault that you can’t play together isn’t the behavior of grown-ups.
You could also look to the Clinton years, and impeachment as a time when the deliberate division of the country took precedence over anything important. Or look back to the Gingrich revolution, when the government was shut down over a bicker over spending caps. Deeply partisan divide using fear is nothing new… hell, we could take a page from the 19th century if we want to feel better about how bad it really isn’t—at least we’re not about to break into opposing blocs and slaughter each other on the fields of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
A little bit of History goes a long way.
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