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For quite some time, at least as long as I have been politically aware (2000 election), the tactics of the right have been to attack their opponents not with any sort of reasoned arguments, but by attacking their character, their patriotism, in fact anything to keep from having a reasoned argument. During the Bush/Gore election, there were crazy things going around like, "Gore invented the internet." For Bush, he was the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with. After 9-11, anyone who disagreed with Bush's policies was a terrorist or at best, wanted to offer counselling to terrorists.
More recently, anyone who supported overhauling the healthcare system was a socialist, linking that to communism and the old Soviet Union. The people who supported it were then people who wanted to turn America into the USSR, who hated America and it capitalistic system. And there were the death panels. This overhaul would give give a committee the right to "kill grandma" when it became economically better to do so. All of this was total bullshit for so many reasons that it's not worth discussing. However, it was discussed at the time, instead of having any sort of real argument about the actual legislation. It was a tactic to divert the argument away from anything with substance and to demonize those supporting it as un-American murders.
Is it any real surprise that now, the people who buy into the right's political philosophy have less of a problem killing their opponents? Their right, like the crusaders were right and were justified in whatever they did against those who were wrong, or evil. It's more like a religious war than a political debate. Furthermore, one doesn't negotiate with evil (one doesn't negotiate with terrorists), so compromising is out of the question. Having painted the left as evil, grandma-killing people, it would be morally wrong to work with them, to compromise, to have any reasonable discourse.
The country suffer greatly from this. We get bad legislation and bad policies, and people get killed.
How do we fight this? That's a difficult question, but I'll start by saying that we can't get pulled into the ridiculous arguments that the right puts forth, that we have to call them out on the tactic. Yeah I know, good luck with that. The Republicans don't want to stop their tactics because they have no real policy that people would support if they actually examined it coherently. Maybe it's possible to lay out the situation and say, instead of dealing with the problems of the country and finding solutions, instead of building a great nation that can put a man on the moon or be innovative, we get death panels. Perhaps after seeing what the right's tactics do, having seen the massacre this week, people might be slightly more willing to listen. For damn sure, the right doesn't want the people to do that.
The alternative is to keep on the path we're going, where our infrastructure is deteriorating, our schools are less and less funded, and our people are further behind the rest of the world because building a great nation would be socialism. Because those poor people who are now sucking the welfare would get further rewards for being lazy (yes I know there are Mack truck-sized holes in that, but too many people would buy it).
What we don't need is to argue and compromise with the right as if they were honest about trying to do what's best.
As a side note, I'm an engineer and not too good at writing things of this nature, so I'm sorry about the rambling style of writing here. I felt I had to say something.
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