I know yesterday's election was a heartbreaker for you.
The President was re-elected with a majority of the popular vote and with only two fewer states than he won last time. The Democrats actually expanded their majority in the Senate. For the first time ever, voters approved same sex marriage in several states, and even weed was legalized in two states. In California we passed Governor Brown's tax increase and Democrats got a supermajority in both houses of the legislature for the first time ever.
Yesterday was quite a major victory for the center-left in America, and quite a major loss for the center-right. The thing is, I know what it is like to lose an election. It happened to my side in 2000, 2002, and 2004 - three times in a row. It is utterly heartbreaking. So unlike other people, I am not going to gloat about yesterday, I am going to say I am empathetic for your loss and I hope we can all move forward together.
BUT, in return, I am going to ask of you one thing. It is a simple and polite request from a fellow citizen.
We have all been given some very dire predictions about what would happen in the case that Obama was re-elected. These predictions have come from major pillars of the American Right, such as Fox Channel personalities, many Republican Party elected officials such as Michelle Bachmann and Allan West, and pundits such as Barry Rubin and Dinesh D'souza. The later even made an entire movie on the topic of predicting what America will look like in 2016 if Obama wass reelected.
There have been claims that America will become socialist, that we will simply lose our freedom. There have been predictions that religion or guns will be banned. There have been predictions that marriages and families will fall apart if gay marriage goes forward. And, most importantly for this blog, there have also been many claims that Iran will get a nuclear weapon and that Israel will be abandoned, all if Obama won another term.
So what I am asking of my Republican and conservative friends, family, and readers is this: IF, in four years, America is not a socialist hellhole, if in four years there have been no moves to limit freedom of religion or Second Amendment rights, if in four years the divorce rate is the same or lower, if in four years Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and Israel is in the same or a better security situation than today and has not been abandoned by this administration...
will you open your mind to the possibility that the above mentioned entities, the Fox Channels, the Allan Wests, the Barry Rubins and Dinesh D'souzas, have all been misleading you? Will you open your mind to the possibility that these people are simply incorrect, when their predictions don't come true?
Let me also mention that whatever warnings may have been sounded about a Romney Presidency, we can't do the experiment to see if they were right or wrong, because we won't have a Romney presidency. But we can do the experiment to see whether the dire predictions about an extended Obama presidency will come true, because he won. And if they don't come true, the intellectually honest thing to do is to reevaluate the intelligence and reliability of those who provided those predictions.
ReplyDeleteYep.. and thank G-d we will never have a Romney Presidency...
DeleteThe thing is that we do know something about Romney and what he would have done by his track record. I mean he was Governor of MA where he lost the popular vote by 21%, He had a 34% approval rating upon leaving office.
On the Middle East after saying that he would recognize Jerusalem he quickly changed his mind and backed off of it. When asked if he would have supported tossing Mubarak, he answered that he would have done the same thing the President did. SO... What the hell are conservatives and ODS'ers even talking about? Nothing. They simply just want to keep yapping about how they know the real truth. All in an effort to hide their hatred for Arabs and Muslims in general. They are like the Dick Morris' of predictions. Wrong about everything.
You on the other hand are right about this... IF in four years their apocalyptic visions about President Obama don't come true... then would they admit that their right wing Guru's were wrong? From what I see today... they can't even address that. They talk about ideological blindness yet that is their stock in trade. AND, I would add ideological deafness as well.