I found the article excerpted below disturbing in 1995 just as I found your comments disturbing today.
Our commitment to our Constitution and the legitimacy of its offices should not vary depending on who holds them. As distasteful as it may be, your president and all Americans' president is George W. Bush. We can fight the man and his agenda, but not the institution itself.
http://www.studiolarz.com/erickson/articles/weimar.html">AMERICAN WEIMAR By STEVE ERICKSON
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Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, January 8, 1995
The National Fury -- at Government, Politicians, the Electoral Process -- Is Overwhelming Not Just Bill Clinton’s Presidency, But Also Our Basic Faith in Democracy Itself. America wearies of democracy. Thirty years after a war that wounded its heart, 20 years after a scandal that scarred its conscience, 10 years after fiscal policies that ridiculed its sense of responsibility and fairness, the country has nearly exhausted the qualities by which democracy survives and flourished. America feels at the end of its power, and the result is a hysteria of which we’re barely conscious, a hysteria in which democracy appears as a spectacle of impotence and corruption. . . .
History is clear that democracy cannot long navigate a sea of national rage. Untempered by rationale and open-mindedness, fury eventually consumes democracy rather than nourishes it, because it overwhelms our tolerance, our willingness to be reasonably informed, our determination to hold ourselves accountable for what we decide. Most important, it overwhelms our basic faith in democracy itself and our belief in the individual freedoms that are inviolate to the power of the majority, identified by the Declaration of Independence as endowed by God and codified in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. We display less and less patience with what we previously held to be inalienable, less and less patience with democracy’s inherent messiness and inefficiency and the morass of conflicting interests that are read in democracy’s results. We display less patience, in other words, with other Americans
. . .
Nevertheless, since the election of a liberal Democrat to the presidency two years ago, the Right has incessantly questioned not simply his policies and his character, but his very legitimacy. The night of Clinton’s election, Bob Dole appeared on television not to congratulate the new President or call on the country to support him, but rather to point out that, seeing as how Clinton received only 43% of the vote, Dole saw it as his job to be de facto president for the other 57%. In Clinton’s first presidential speech to a joint session of Congress, Republicans openly laughed at him, something for which there is no precedence in modern memory. In remarks on the floor of the House, Dick Armey, the Texas Republican who is now the new majority leader, taunted Democrats by referring to Clinton as “your President” -- this following his description of the First Lady as a Marxist. Former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North said last fall that Clinton was not his commander-in-chief, and the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, has suggested the military would happily harm the President if given the opportunity. Without substantiation, Newt Gingrich claimed the Clinton White House is a bacchanal of drugs, and Rush Limbaugh has hinted -- and the Rev. Jerry has openly charged -- that Clinton has had people murdered.
In the shortest and meanest terms, all of this may be viewed as “merely” a partisan effort to destroy Clinton at any cost. In fact, it is worse. Questioning Clinton’s legitimacy, the leading spokesmen for the Right insidiously question the legitimacy of democracy itself.. . . The grand arrogance of America has always been that it would dictate its own terms to history rather than the other way around. Again and again the 20th Century has tried to say no to democracy, and again and again America has answered yes. The final American irony will be if, at the end of the century, with no foes left, having vanquished all those who laid siege to democracy, this country now turns to finish the job.
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