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Dear Andrew,
You undoubtedly have never heard of me, and it's unlikely you'll actually read this. I write a weekly column for Democratic Underground. You have occasionally mentioned Democratic Underground in your blog, but usually it's been to take a particularly damning quote from a particularly loopy post and present it out of context as if it is representative of the kind of debate that normally goes on there. Well, for the record, there are over 30,000 people registered at Democratic Underground, and not all of us are lunatics. Well, not the bad kind of lunatics, anyhow. But all that is neither here nor there.
Last time I visited your blog it was after hearing about your elaboration of the "flypaper theory" about the war in Iraq. At the time, I remember wondering why, since you do appear to be smart enough to know better, you found this load of hooey persuasive. It appeared that for you, or at least for your rhetorically constructed persona, it came down to the fact that you trusted Bush. It's hard for me to imagine what it must be like to trust Bush. But I can see how, if one did, the war in Iraq might have made sense...for a while.
This evening I went over to see how you were taking Bush's announcement of his support for a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. After being, at first, rather taken aback by the explosion of outrage and anger, I did find this interesting passage:
"The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth."
Well, Andrew, you're wrong about one thing. Bush is a uniter. In fact, I think Bush is the only force in all of God's creation capable of making the two of us agree on something.
I just finished putting my column for this week in the can, as it were. It was all about how I came to vote for Nader in 2000, and why I'll be damned if I do it again in 2004. Going back over the Clinton years gave me the opportunity to relive all over again the sense of betrayal and hurt that my partner and I felt as we watched Clinton fail to deliver on promise after promise. But I tell you what, that all must fade to insignificance compared to betrayal and hurt you must be feeling right now. Because if you really, sincerely, trusted Bush all this time, and really, sincerely, believed that he would oppose this amendment out of principle, then this has got to be the mother of all rude awakenings.
You'll be busy sorting out the emotional fallout, no doubt; but there are a few things I wanted to say to you, as one blogger to another. One is that I have always underestimated you. Whenever the question came up, as it sometimes did in the Democratic Underground forums, of whether there was anything Bush could possibly do that would make you realize that supporting him was a mistake, I always said there wasn't. My position was always that you were so determined to identify with the power and privilege represented by the Republican Party that you would never understand that as a gay man you would always be excluded from it. Clearly, I was wrong about that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I've probably lost some money on it. So I apologize for having assumed that you were more ideologically blinded than you actually are.
The other is just a gentle suggestion that you consider--just consider, mind you--the possibility that just as Bush was lying when he constructed himself as a 'compassionate conservative' during his 2000 campaign, he might--just might--have been lying about a few other things too. And that just as he is perfectly willing to sell out you and the rest of the Log Cabin Republicans in order to pander to his fundmanetalist base, he might have been willing to do a few other highly despicable things to promote his own self-interest. Like starting a bogus war in Iraq, for instance. Just a thought.
And finally, I thought I would share with you this snippet from one of my own columns a couple weeks back, called "Cassandra's Curse:"
"Bush's appearance on ...does represent a real change; and unfortunately it represents the fact that more of our fellow - Americans are now sharing the distress, anxiety, bitterness, and pain we feel when we contemplate the condition of our country. Instead of mourning this change as too little and too late, we should celebrate it as a sign that things are finally getting better. And we should remember that every American who has belatedly come to realize what Bush and his cartel really are has had to come to it through confusion, pain, and anger - just like we did. If we can understand that pain and sympathize with it, then maybe we'll be able to build ourselves a bigger coalition; and maybe, when the future finally arrives, it will be good news for a change."
The stakes are high, the threat is great, and the evil we face is powerful. We need all the allies we can get. Welcome to the fight, Andrew. Onward to victory.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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