Today In Both Sides Do It: With Malice Towards None, With Charity For All

The year was 2003.

The lead vocalist of The Dixie Chicks said a mean thing about President George W. Bush.

Here is what happened next...

The year is 2015.

After enduring six and a half straight years of the most openly reactionary, seditious, destructive and often racist opposition to any President since Lincoln with Vulcan-like calm and equanimity, (from Media Matters) --

-- delivered by the same Conservative asshats who lost their shit when the lead vocalist of The Dixie Chicks said a mean thing about George Bush, President Barack Obama has finally had it with their treacherous assholery:

Obama Chides Anti-Refugee Politicians for Being 'Scared of Widows and 3-Year-Old Orphans'

The reaction was swift and predictable.

The leading lights of the American Fascist Party cranked up the crazy to eleven:

From The Weekly Standard:

Obama's 'Shameful' Policy Toward Middle Eastern Christians

Rush Limbaugh:

...

As President Obama continues his push to bring more Syrian refugees to America even in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks by the Islamic State, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh says the U.S. president is now a threat.

“I’m telling you Obama has become dangerous,” declared Limbaugh on his national broadcast Wednesday. “Where do you think the modern-day, 19- [or] 20-year-old terrorist comes from, Mr. President?”

...

From CNN:

Chris Christie: Obama 'created the refugee crisis' in Syria

Again from CNN:

Trump: Obama a 'threat to our country'

From TPM:

Cruz Hits Back At Obama: 'Lunacy' To Let 'Syrian Muslim Refugees' In US

Meanwhile, American Fascist Party's collaborators in the Both Siderist media blame Both Sides.

The New York Post:

Both Obama, GOP sound ridiculous discussing ISIS

By John Podhoretz November 17, 2015

The inevitable Ron Fournier:

From @NBCFirstRead, shame on us and our "leaders" in both parties: pic.twitter.com/3SguC6RviG

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) November 19, 2015

And while former Bush Regime speechwriter, Michael Gerson, did pen an entire column warning that blanket, anti-Muslim bigotry is the worst possible reaction to threats from one small group of well-funded monsters...

All our efforts are undermined by declaring Islam itself to be the enemy, and by treating Muslims in the United States, or Muslims in Europe, or Muslims fleeing Islamic State oppression, as a class of suspicious potential jihadists.

...he could not force his tiny pink pincers to type the word "Republican" even once.   This is because Mr. Gerson is a craven Beltway cog who does not want to wake up with a horse head and pink slip in his bed.  And so, instead of a very specific and easily-identified group of Republicans being called out by name, Mr. Gerson carefully weasels his way out of danger by blaming generic "American politicians" once again:

America’s politicians are feeding the Islamic State narrative

...

But if U.S. politicians define Islam as the problem and cast aspersions on Muslim populations in the West, they are feeding the Islamic State narrative. They are materially undermining the war against terrorism...

150 years ago, during his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln did not preen about glorious victory, or gloat about his martial might.  Instead he gave the kind of speech our modern Beltway is desperate to hear from the Kenyan Usurper: a plea for an end to the conflict which was tearing his country in half --

"...let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

-- and a promise that his former antagonists would be greeted with kindness and generosity...

"With malice towards none, with charity for all..."

Lincoln's humble and sober second inaugural address is rightly considered one of the greatest speeches in American history.

But is also true that Lincoln would never have been in a position to deliver such speech in March of 1865 had his military not spent the previous four years fighting a bloody civil war designed to slowly and relentlessly destroy the Confederacy's will and means to fight.

Once the American Fascist Party is razed to its foundations and rebuilt as something other than a Koch Brothers production of Rush Limbaugh's wet-dreams, I for one will be delighted to give up this kind of blogging and write gentle paeans to true bipartisanship.

But until then, fuck these people.