What he said...ditto

I haven't paid much attention to this blog lately; seems I always have other things to do. It's apparently a cyclical thing for me, so I'll try to begin an "up" cycle and see where it goes.

Thomas Friedman, with whom I don't always agree, has a good Op-Ed in the NY Times today (free registration required to read the link). I think what he's saying is correct, but I'm not sure as a country we'll change the political path we're on. Instead of working to solve so many of the obvious problems in the country we're concerned only with politics. I know politics have been around a lot more years than I have but they level of "noise" has not been this shrill before, at least not in my lifetime. Instead of having substantive debates about the issues we've got people painting Hitler moustaches on pictures of Obama and saying he's a Nazi Communist (do those people even know what each of those terms means, and understand the irony of their statement?). Instead of of using the "town hall" meetings that many members of Congress held over the summer to have a rational discussion over issues, there was an organized effort to simply disrupt them so that nothing got discussed, and no information got shared. I can only think that they were afraid of a calm rational discussion in those town halls because they had nothing rational to present to make their case.

Don't people realize that through their short-sighted hatred of the president and simply being sore losers that they are shooting themselves in the foot, and shooting the rest of the country in the foot at the same time? I do not understand how trying to incite violence against the president is accomplishing anything, other than those people being tools for the right-wing politicians. Devolving the country into chaos will not serve their interests, although they are being told that it will. I can understand them practicing dissent, but they've gone far beyond dissent. The people trying to delegitimize Obama actually seem very proud of themselves; I see them as somewhat pathetic in that they have no rational argument to present and are merely parroting what they're told. Sadly, I don't see this ending any time soon, and not ending well when it does.