I mean, if someone can come up with a new twist, good on ya. But where it's just repeating "surging" and "running" and "coming from behind" allusions to that substance that metaphorically resembles the former Senator, I just don't find it funny anymore. All the jokes about "Romney plans to smear Santorum with a Superpac," are graphic, but just not clever anymore. Again, my overwrought opinion only.
Perhaps it's just my refined upper class upbringing among the social elites of Gotham City, but in the short time that I had with my late parents (don't get me started!) they taught me there's a difference between good natured teasing among friends and the relentless taunting of others. As a child I often played with the children of the hired help when their parents brought them out to our stately family manor; and Mother always insisted that I treat them just as if they were as good as us. Good breeding and good character are best shown by one's generosity, she'd tell me during my alloted play-time.
And so I see a parallel with the constant state of personalized scorn directed toward Rick Santorum. I mean, it's not like Rick Santorum or his children read DU--their loss--but there's more victims that just the beset-upon when one devotes so much time and effort toward scorning others. It cultivates a smallness of temperament in us if we acculturate ourselves to always spewing potty-languages invectives at our political opponents. I don't argue that Republicans deserve better; culturally, they are a wellspring of ill-mannered hatreds and unpatriotic divisiveness. Rather, I argue that we owe it to ourselves not to sacrifice our liberality of character, that is, not to sink into the self-degrading hatreds that mar the moral characters of far too many conservatives.
Let me offer a flawed analogy, yet a comparison worthy of your consideration. As a concerned limosine liberal, I may believe in "getting tough" on al-Qaeda, but I do not condone the use of torture or the use of other tactics that betray the core values of egalitarian Americanism. We ought not sacrifice the moral high ground when fighting malreligious reprobates who dwell in moral gutters. We may remain unsullied when we adhere to our values throughout the fight, because the fight itself is a test of those values. Likewise, though not all Republican reprobates are of the malreligious stripe, when we conduct political fights against the incivility of Tea Partyism and neoconservatism and the tribal anti-progressivism of the political Right, we should strive to retain our liberality and generosity, no matter how tough we have to get with them.
We should bet angry, but not hateful, at the injustice they champion. We should hammer them with facts and truthtelling, but not cross the line into divisiveness or sectional chauvinism. We should fight their grotesque ideologies with reason and philsophy, but not erect counter-ideologes that prize a tribal conformity over fact and social cohesion. These are the social goals that most conservatives oppose--tolerance, unity, and compassion. We shouldn't sacrifice these values in the causee of defeating those who oppose them.
Don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong an occasional snicker at a naughty joke told at an opponent's expense. But the liberal spirit, I think, requires a social sense of moderation wherever we razz the other team. Conservatives I think of as wayward children of our shared national family--we seek to best them, but not destroy them. It's a fine line. I guess, I'm saying it's a little tougher being liberal. I think it's worth the effort. I think the glacial progress of building a more civil society requires us to leave room at the table, that after we trounce them in the next election, we make it easier for them to reclaim the civility they seem to scorn whenever a Democrat wins the White House.
As my old sensei Kirigi told me, "Choose your enemies wisely, for you may become them." If our group identity as Democrats is best defined by loathing our opponents, what will we have won when we win? What, my old chums, will we have lost in our victory?
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