Conservative Andrew Sullivan Cries Foul: "Republican Taliban declare jihad on Obama"

ClarkUSA

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Mon Feb-16-09 03:05 PM
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Conservative Andrew Sullivan Cries Foul: "Republican Taliban declare jihad on Obama"

Edited on Mon Feb-16-09 03:47 PM by ClarkUSA

Top blogger Andrew Sullivan is a gay conservative who is disgusted with the modern Republican Party. This is his pithy analysis
of the games that the party of Greedy Old Pricks are trying to play on President Obama... without much success.

Goodbye to all that? Washington, it appears, has other ideas. Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of pragmatic
liberalism and an end to frothy ideological warfare in Washington. From the beginning of the campaign he went out
of his way not to engage in Republican-bashing or even Clinton-bashing. He was intent on bringing reason and
open-mindedness to America’s often fraught ideological debates. He was incandescently clear that he rejected the
toxic partisan atmosphere that had dominated the Bill Clinton and George W Bush years.

Since November he has largely walked the walk... he did his best to accommodate Republican concerns - adding
deeper and wider tax cuts than his own party was comfortable with...this open hand was met with a punch in the
face... And this after eight years in which they managed to turn a surplus into a trillion-dollar deficit and added a
cool $32 trillion to the debt the next generation will have to pay for. Every now and again their chutzpah and
narcissism take one’s breath away... Pete Sessions, chairman of the Republican congressional committee,
explained that the Republican strategy was going to be modelled on jihadist insurgency. “I’m not joking,”
he added. “Insurgency we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban.”

Rush Limbaugh, the dominant figure among the Republican base, fresh from broadcasting a ditty called Barack,
the Magic Negro, declared in the first week of the new Congress that he hoped the new president would fail...
Bitter? At the end of last week we saw just how bitter. One of the Republicans who had agreed to serve
in Obama’s cabinet, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, abruptly pulled out... Gregg had been under
intense pressure from the Republican base, especially in his home state, for cooperating with the devil...
Gregg was a victim of fast-shifting Republican politics. Reeling from the election, watching a new president
coopt some of their number and get alarmingly high approval ratings from the public, members of the opposition
party made a decision to become an insurgency... It’s not clear, however, that total war on the president is going
to be a better way forward. Before the latest twist, a Gallup poll found that Obama’s handling of the
stimulus package had almost twice the public support of the Republicans’. In a period of acute economic
anxiety, Americans outside the Republican base may not be so thrilled to find a replay of the 1990s. Obama
won in part because he seemed not part of that drama.

The Democrats and the liberal base have responded to all this with a mixture of cynicism and their own partisanship.
They rolled their eyes at Obama’s outreach to Republicans; they hated the inclusion of the other party in the cabinet
and had to swallow hard not to complain about the postpartisan rhetoric. Their cynicism is well earned. But my bet is
that Obama also understands that this is, in the end, the sweet spot for him. He has successfully branded himself by
a series of conciliatory gestures as the man eager to reach out. If this is spurned, he can repeat the gesture until the
public finds his opponents seriously off-key.

Conservative Andrew Sullivan Cries Foul: "Republican Taliban declare jihad on Obama"

Obama Rope Factory runs overtime