When I was a blogger at the ’04 Republican Convention, I was feeling very weird (almost out of body) since I had, until that time, never voted for – or even considered voting for – a Republican for President and I was about to pull the lever for Bush. In the midst of this, I was noticed by an old radical-liberal journalist buddy who grinned at me and wagged his finger, saying “You’ll be back!” (meaning back to the liberal fold, of course). I felt a sharp tinge of guilt. Maybe he was right.
Now that all seems ridiculous. Back to what? There is no there. Or, to once again paraphrase the great Preston Sturges: “Lberalism is not only dead, it’s decomposed.” (He was speaking of “chivalry.)
The ongoing Edwards comedy reminds me of all this. It is redolent of the old Roman legal principle “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” not just because Edwards is lying all over the place like a Shakespearean fool, but because the lie easily metastasizes from sex to his self-important pronouncements about the poor while building himself a 28000 square foot house (not your garden variety Mother Teresa).
But is it fair, as I do in the headline, to tarnish Obama with the Edwards brush? Isn’t Barack legitimately a liberal or a leftist or something? Isn’t there some ideology there? Well, frankly, I think not. The only ideology, if you can call it that, is to attract a certain number of brain-washed (mostly by the MSM) voters. Obama statements have already morphed completely into “McCain lite.” On energy, foreign policy, trade, etc. he is saying essentially the same thing now as McCain has been saying for months. There is, in Obama’s case, quite properly no there there. So is his ideology essentially a lie? Is there such a thing as liberalism anymore? Is there some place for me to go home to as my old friend suggested at the ’04 Convention? Where is it?
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