President Obama Still Thirsts For David Brooks' Approval

For the record, I would be delighted if Barack Obama were on the top of the Democratic Party ticket this year.  I would gavotte across broken glass singing Ave Maria to vote for him again.

But he's not running.

On the other hand, he does still have one of the mightiest megaphones in the solar system, and when he used it to say this, I was greatly cheered.

Obama says White House response to coronavirus has been 'absolute chaotic disaster'

Former President Barack Obama delivered a blistering critique of the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus crisis, describing it as "an absolute chaotic disaster" during a private call Friday night with people who worked for him in the White House and across his administration...

And then, 2004 DNC Keynote Purple State Obama showed up, and I was much less cheered:

"This election that's coming up -- on every level -- is so important because what we're going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party," Obama said. "What we're fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy -- that has become a stronger impulse in American life."

This is stunningly wrong on every level.

This election is most definitely about a particular individual and the party of bigots and imbeciles which he leads and it is most definitely about how they came to be that way. 

Because we are divided.  And this is true because Republicans wish it to be so. Hating everyone and everything that Fox News and Hate Radio bids them to hate is their unifying force.  Their business model.  Their identity.  Or don't you remember your eight years as president during which time your every attempt at outreach across the aisle was greeted with obstruction, filibustering and sabotage by a party that robbed you of your right to appoint a Supreme Court justice and then laughed about it as their coup de grace before nominating and electing the King of the Birthers?

They are the enemy because they have spent the past 40 years working assiduously and spending billions of dollars making themselves the enemy.  They're proud of their ignorance, their sadism and their bigotry -- they revel in their bile and believe it to be a virtue.

As for being "tribal", Jebus Christ on a tightrope, while you're at it, why not tsk tsk the Allies in World War II for being "tribal", or the Civil Right Movement for being "tribal"?

When an enemy has declared their singular goal to be the destruction of everything you hold dear, when they have spent decades marshaling their forces, amping up the white nationalist hysteria of their foot soldiers and relentlessly crippling one democratic institution after another, it is long past time to stop trying to appease them.

As long as the GOP has one, filthy finger on one lever of power anywhere, officially sanctioned fraud, corruption, vengeance and show trials will never end.  And in the face of that implacable madness it is an entirely sane and healthy reaction for all us who love this country and fear for its future together to work together to re-establish Justice, re-insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

You may call that "tribalism", Mr. President.

I call it patriotism.

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