Ignoring reality
When a company or a political party or an individual starts to ignore reality, the future becomes bleak. While reality might be safely ignored for a while, the longer such ignorance endures and the broader its swatch becomes, the more longevity dwindles. The GOP has made a practice of ignoring reality for some time, and the results are coming in—but the habit, it seems, is hard to break. The Anonymous Liberal points to a recent example:
Peter Kirsninow at The Corner sums up the response to Obama’s speech yesterday among drive-time radio callers:
Judging from the local drive time radio shows, we bitter, religious pistol-packers here in flyover country remembered only two things from Obama’s Berlin visit: the phrase “citizen of the world” and Obama’s failure to visit wounded troops at Landstuhl and Ramstein.
He goes on to explain that:[P]eople were put off by Obama proclaiming himself to be a citizen of the world when — according to several callers — he regularly gives indications he’s not particularly enthused about being a citizen of the United States.
Yeah, like the time he said he was a “proud citizen of the United States” immediately before calling himself a citizen of the world!Seriously, it’s this kind of stuff that makes me crazy. As many others have noted, just about every politician has referred to him or herself as a “citizen of the world” at some point in their career. From a quick google search, that list includes Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Rudy Giuliani, among others. And as numerous outlets are reporting today, Obama didn’t visit the troops at Landstuhl and Ramstein because the Department of Defense told him not to!Of course none of this stopped right-wing blowhards from pushing these false memes yesterday and generating all this misdirected outrage. Sadly, this is what American politics has become in the age of Rush Limbaugh.
