it’s all there…

Posted on Monday 4 May 2009

I was wrong, Paul Rosenberg has finished his excellent series.
I’m not going to summarize it after all. I’m going to talk about my thoughts about its implication.s But a word about the summary I’m not writing. The thrust of this series is that [1] Obama’s attempt at finding a "consensus"  is flawed. [2] Because of this flaw, Obama is diluting his own [and our] values. [3] There is an alternative way to approach things. [1] and [2] are brilliant. [3] is very interesting and if Paul runs for office, I’ll vote for him. But Obama is not Paul Rosenfeld, and we elected Obama. Even if Obama isn’t exactly what Paul wants, or exactly what I want, the point is not, right now, to enact A Genuine Cross-Ideological Approach Rooted In Core Liberal Values. It’s not that I would object to that at all. I’m way big on cross-ideological ideas, and I eat core liberal values for breakfast almost every morning.

Paul writes that the differences between "liberals" and "conservative" are deeply rooted in the human psychology, down there where sex and love and greed and eny live. That’s right. Since I’m an almost reflex "liberal," I think that my core-values are the good ones, and conservative values are the bad/evil ones. But I have conservative friends. And I notice that they think that my core-values are naive and based on a polyanna view of mankind, and sometimes they think that they’re evil. This counterplay between different kinds of people, "liberal" and "conservative"  has been going on since the dawn of social mankind, and will outlive Paul Rosenfeld, Barack Obama, and 1boringoldman. We’ve struggled with this in America since before there was an America. We white americans were originally descendents of Britain’s rejects or their colonizing gentry. Whichever we were, we were being victimized by a bad king. So we had a Revolution.

Revolution is a word that means a turn around. If you stand on a spot and make "one revolution," you’ll notice that when it’s over, you’re looking at the same thing and in the same spot. Our founders knew that, so they put together a government that changed things a little from the one we were leaving. It’s a "bad king antedote" government. We’d have an Executive Branch so we could get things done, but we’d have a ton of things in place to deal with a "bad king." We voted to get our king. We limited the tenure of the king. We had legislative and judicial branches as checks and balances on our king. We had certain principles that our king was required to follow.

Several of our Administrations were not only bad kings, they also destroyed the system we had to deal with them. My objectives for Obama are that he be honest, abide by our rules, and be forced to allow us to find out how bad our last king[s] really were. Replacing the "bad" conservative core-values of the bad king with the "good" liberal core-values of the good king isn’t his purpose at the moment. His purpose is to be a good king. That’s all. If he tries to be a good liberal, we’re in for another round. He’s already a good-enough liberal as he stands. The current need is for him to have the core-values of a decent human being.

Nixon/Ford were followed by Jimmy Carter. The conservatives destroyed him. as a naive, self righteous, incompetent. Reagan/Bush was followed by Clinton. He was more resiliant, but the conservatives found his achilles heel and drove a Mack Truck through it. Bush[Cheney] weren’t just conservatives, they were morally unfit for office. All of America can see that Obama is a good person who genuinely wants to find a compromise between the two sides of our split country. He’s doing his job. So I love Paul Rosenfeld’s pieces and agree with what he says. But I don’t want Obama to change one little hair on his head. And I bet Obama will end up doing everything on Paul Rosenberg’s list before it’s over and done with…
  1.  
    Joy
    May 5, 2009 | 4:13 PM
     

    I just wrote President Obama about Senator Spector and I hope he listens. Spector wants Coleman to win. I don’t have the patience to have Spector on our team for humanity. I think Rep. Sestak a much better future Senator in PA.

  2.  
    May 6, 2009 | 12:41 AM
     

    And he’s apparently a really strong campaigner…

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