Kristol muses on last night’s canceled baseball playoff game
William Kristol of Fox News and The Weekly Standard offers these brief thoughts in his latest blog entry:
When The Decline and Fall of the American Republic is written centuries hence, the date October 17, 2012, will occupy a prominent place in the narrative. On this day, a playoff game between the Yankees and the Tigers in Detroit was called not because of rain, but because of … the threat of rain. Just as today’s “liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism,” so, in Obama’s America, Major League Baseball cancels games not because of rain but because of trembling in the presence of the threat of rain.
The quotation about liberalism references Kristol’s latest Weekly Standard feature.
Obama is depressed because today’s liberalism is depressing. Obama is world-weary because modern liberalism is world-weary. Hope and change was just campaign talk. The real existing liberal president lives in an atmosphere of reduced hope and hostility to needed change. As Mansfield puts it, “Obama’s air of ennui in the debate arises not just from his personal character of cool but more from his thoughts about the future. He sees America in decline. He does not say it, but he sees it, and it determines his politics as well as his demeanor.”
Written by Mitch Kokai
One comment
First, the baseball game was not called because the threat of rain would make poor little commoners uncomfortable. No, the game was called because it would made for terrible ratings to have a 7 hour rain-delayed game. Ratings equal money. Pure and simple.
So Kristol’s is flat wrong on that (among many other things).
Furthermore, the problem with the modern Republican party is that it sees ALL Dems as extremists–liberals who have an hardened agenda of anti capitalism, limited rights, etc.
While there are fringe groups that may believe this form of liberalism, MOST liberals are moderates are just like Obama: We believe steadfastly in free markets and capitalism, personal freedoms and rights. At the same time, we also know that as a society we have to have strong governance so that the whole damn thing doesn’t spin out of control into chaos—exactly what our health care system has been doing for the past 20 years.
The GOP needs a black and white view of the world to sustain itself (otherwise, you lose the Christian base of your party.) Liberals and moderates, unlike conservatives, don’t have a black and white, us against them, good and bad, capitalism and communism, view of the world. We know that the world is a much more complex and nuanced place.
That is precisely why Dems are better presidents and why Obama will be reelected.
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