I was never really one to have anything but contempt for the people who said that people who opposed President Bush were unpatriotic. Honestly, it's just not a constructive thing to say, even when true.
But as we know, Rush Limbaugh declared in 2009 that he wanted Obama to fail. Since then, the right wing has waged war on the President. They obstructed his agenda (while criticizing the Dems for not being bipartisan). They wanted to stop the PPACA because it would have been Obama doing something positive, not because they didn't like the bill. After all, the PPACA is essentially the warmed-over Bob Dole proposal from the 90s. Now it's suddenly incipient Marxism.
They could at least hide behind their constant opposition to health care reform and in favor of big business.
But the right wing has sunk to a new low over the last 24 hours. This is the party that called anyone who didn't want to carpet bomb Afghanistan a traitor and who wanted to question every Muslim in the US, and who's big joke about Obama was that his name sounded like Osama.
Now they can't stand it that Obama gets to announce OBL's capture. So, they start blaming him for taking credit. They say that it was President Bush's work that got him. They lied and said the information came from torture at Gitmo, even though Obama didn't shut down Guantanamo and defied a campaign promise in doing so and drew pretty extreme heat from his base for it. Yet they blame him for something he didn't even do. They are upset that OBL's (may his name be blotted out of existence) body was disposed of by burial at sea. I guess shooting him in the head wasn't good enough.
They can't just be glad that he's dead? Well, they'll tell you, they are but they are disappointed that Obama is bringing politics into it. Of course, he didn't bring politics into it, they did, but whatever. This is the party that ran an ad superimposing OBL's face over a triple-amputee veteran in the 2002 Georgia senatorial election. This is the party that said the Democrats want the terrorists to win; and now they want politics out of it.
We should be outraged, but this is nothing new.
If Richard Hofstadter were to write The Paranoid Style in American Politics today, he would have to add a section on the exposure of some of their more cherished ideas as bullshit. They always want a do over. Take Nixon. The Pentagon Papers fiasco was mostly embarrassing to the Johnson administration, but he was worried about his bomb-the-hell-out-of-them approach to Vietnam being exposed. Really, Vietnam was the keystone issue of that era. Anything that vindicated the peace movement was anathema to the reaction and it's leader, Nixon.
Nixon administration folks bore the grudge of Vietnam and the grudge of Watergate into the 2010s. They simply cannot let evidence get in the way of these convictions. People believe all sorts of lies about the Vietnam era now, like the liberals stabbed the military in the back and wouldn't let them win (no troop increase was ever denied and we bombed the hell out of the whole country), that veterans were spit on when they returned (apparently made up, but veterans were leaders of the anti-war movement!) and so on. This grudge was held against John Kerry in the 2004 election—old resentments from Vietnam became an issue that we heard more about than present concerns like the environment or manufacturing jobs in that election.
Nixon staffers like former Chief Justice Rehnquist and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were so bitter about Watergate that they constructed a whole new theory of Presidential power which they implemented not to defend America from OBL, but to win the gubernatorial election in Alabama, replace US Attorneys and launch a fiasco of a war in Iraq.
And so yet another decade has come and with it yet another (at least one) gigantic demonstration of the failure of Republican thinking in the Iraq war.
The current crop of GOPers' entire worldview came to being in the post-9/11 era where all of their idiotic schemes were temporarily vindicated by popular sentiment until they were exposed for the bullshit they were. There were no WMDs in Iraq. There were no connections between OBL and Iraq. And yet, President Bush launched this stupid war in the middle of our hunt for OBL, a war that ended up, like Vietnam, being hugely unpopular as it was winding down. They trotted out all of the same lies about Iraq—that it was liberal lies that we couldn't win, that all it would take is more troops, that people were spitting on veterans, and that the opposition is unpatriotic. But none of this mattered.
Unlike Vietnam which spread from a natural instance of our Cold War policy of containment, the Iraq war was sold to an angry American public as the way to fight OBL. We weren't just sold a war; we were sold the war as the means to our vengeance. Once people believed that we weren't interrupting our manhunt for OBL, it made more sense to go to Iraq.
If Obama went to war with a random country tomorrow, and the premise for his war turned out to be a lie, he would pay for it electorally. But if he told us he needed to fight that war to defeat OBL, and then the next President finally got around to doing it, he would get scarred in history. But people should have known; Bush even said he didn't think much about OBL in 2002.
Yes, we wanted to be safe. But we also wanted to get OBL. If you didn't think that, then all of the spontaneous celebrations ten years later should show you that.
And either implicitly or explicitly, Republicans know this. They know that Iraq is a huge fiasco for their brand. This is why we have the "Tea Party" using a different name claiming to be about the Constitution and budgets, when really they're just the same old Republicans. But they resent it. They can't have been wrong. The mass opinion was changed simply by liberal media lies. I don't have one conservative friend that has totally let go of Iraq. They refuse to admit they were wrong about it.
You can bet that for the rest of our lives, the GOP will occupy itself with rewriting the history of the Iraq war the same way they did with Vietnam.
That coupled with their reptilian hatred for Barack Obama simply will not let them compute the fact that what liberals like me have been saying all along—that we should never have abandoned the hunt for Bin Laden, that not all liberals are pacifists, that we weren't against Iraq because we were pacifists but because we were fucking smarter—was right and that it could have been done if we tried hard enough and that their entire bullshit sideshow in Iraq was pointless and based on bullshit lies they were stupid enough to believe.
That would entail admitting that Bush was a moron and Obama is at least a decent president.
But they can't do that. Because that is what it really comes down to for them. They don't want America to succeed if it can't succeed on their terms, even if their terms fail to work and in fact only wreak havoc on this country every time they are implemented.
Democrats have their bad points. They are weak. Their tendency for pragmatism makes them seem soulless. And they are by no means truly a left wing party. They are, basically, the corporate parry that doesn't hate gays (as much).
But Democrats' weaknesses are mostly manifestations of the same essential traits that make up their strengths in other ways. They are not as committed to their ideology, so they are more focused on what works, including what works for getting things through Congress. When you're dealing with nut cutting opponents who don't budge, that can produce terrible results and it has for American workers for too long. But, they don't care about enacting some metaphysical plan if it doesn't do anything. They may get convinced by lobbyists and Slate magazine that something that is really just a right-wing scheme like charter schools, school vouchers, "Partial Birth" abortion bans, free trade, trickle-down economics, the need to "fix" Social Security that will work, but you don't convince them by telling them it's a beautiful implementation of something form the Bible or from Atlas Shrugged, yet that is exactly how you sell it to a Republican. The GOP is only interested in pragmatics in the electoral process.
So, as strange as it might sound, the killing of OBL by a command structure set up by Obama actually gives me more confidence that the PPACA will work well enough, that the Stimulus bill was big enough, and so on. Maybe he and his people have the goods to deliver on these pragmatic things.
But, again, the GOP doesn't want these things to work unless it's on their terms. They would rather see America fail so that they can advance their agenda. And if that's not unpatriotic, I don't know what is.