The Price Of Petulance

Tom e-mails on my post on opposing loyally:

Dang. Just when I was going to get a photo taken with my head all tilty and start a column where I refer to President-Elect Obama as "The Next Occupant", you shame me into getting all mature.

I've spent some time on some Liberal Left Blogsites (Boing Boing, MetaFilter) today. With all due respect to President-Elect Obama, some of the people who voted for/rooted for him are...how to put it nicely...unstable and cultish. People recounting how they broke down weeping and went through a box of Kleenex crying their eyes out when they got the news that Obama had won. Foreigners saying "welcome back to the world, U.S." Apparently, I was supposed to have been ashamed of my country the last eight years because of who the president was. I wasn't ashamed of my country when Bill Clinton was my president even though he did some shameful things.

And for Sarah Palin, yowza, the level of hate these people have for some one who made it on her own (didn't inherit her position based on the death of her husband) and who doesn't agree with their point of view was stunning. Apparently there is a whole porn site-rape culture these people have created to wallow in their hatred of Palin.

The Liberals I know aren't the most self-reflective people. I wonder if someday they will look back at the past eight years and ask how they allowed themselves to get so twisted up about George Bush? Their admonitions to one another about how "now the real work starts" and "we have got to make people change", etc. as if they could not have been doing this throughout the last eight years. Your colleague Medved put it best when he talked about why the Liberals insist on the NEA, PBS and other government funded art - these people want to be the government sanctioned arbiters of what art is. In the same way, these people want to have the government sanction (and pay for) their good works when they could have been doing it themselves all along.

Well, now I must do what I have done the last twenty years the day after a presidential election; get back to work.

If anyone needed a reminder of the consequences of disloyal opposition, it was provided in a piece in today's WSJ called The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

And before your write off those words as nothing more than whining from a Bush-loving neo-con you should know this about the author:

Mr. Shapiro is an investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry's legal team during the presidential election in 2004.