Reformed Hippie

UPDATE: 02/07/2008

For some reason this post disappeared from the blog… don’t know why. So I will try and re-create the spirit of the original from memory and perhaps improve upon it.

I briefly listened to Rush Limbaugh yesterday and to be honest I had to turn him off. Limbaugh, Hannity and others have continuously bashed the liberals for their “hate speak”. For example… referring to President Bush as Hitler and other such hateful people is despicable. Yet Limbaugh is saying that those who back McCain or Huckabee “are the enemy” and the conservatives goal is to “defeat them”. And it was not so much their words that infuriated me but how they said them… the tone… the inflection in their voice made you know that they cannot stand McCain or anyone who endorses him. They are not conservative enough.

F or a very long time I have personally felt that these conservative talk show hosts do damage to the country by dividing America into the good guys and bad guys… the conservatives and liberals. This serves no purpose except to fracture our country.

We are all Americans. Limbaugh is afraid that McCain and Huckabee are not conservative enough. And then when Bob Dole comes to McCain’s defense Limbaugh jumps on him. And Hannity keeps repeating similar language over and over and over again. I guess he figures that if he keeps repeating distorted facts long enough even he will eventually believe them.

Anybody can stand fast on principle. That’s easy. Just say that you cannot do anything because you are standing fast on your principles and then walk away. That is what people like Limbaugh, Hannity and other conservatives do (and liberals too but the conservatives are the ones making the most racket right now). And unfortunately that is what a lot of our politicians are doing. What is hard is holding on to your principles (convictions, beliefs, etc.) and then finding ways to work with others who have differing principles. That takes strength and leadership. If we continually allow our politicians to stand on their party platform and not find ways of working together then we will never get anything accomplished. Oh… that’s where we are at now.

What we need in this country is a President who has principles but yet has the ability to work with others. Democrat or Republican. Working with others and getting things accomplished is not weakness of character or moral mis-direction.  We are all Americans and we should be able to rise above the hate speak and rhetoric and get somebody who can get America’s work done. This is the “change” we want in the White House. Not someone who puts party platform above America’s needs simply to improve their political future at the expense of the country. We all need to find common ground on which to build.

For example… health care. Liberals want “universal health care”. And I know that all Americans, including conservatives, would say that everyone in this country should be allowed to have access to affordable health care. You can call it what you want but the bottom line is that affordable health care should be available to all citizens. See there, we can now all agree on something. That is a start.  So how do we get it done?  We can start by listening to the citizens… then doctors, insurance companies and others who can have a positive impact.  And in so doing you may find that standing on principle is not as important has helping people.

But of course the devil is in the details and it is how we go about it where we get into trouble. But instead of our candidates throwing out some bits and bites during campaign speeches and debates, they need to sit down and think their plans through. Just one thought while re-writing this post… instead of having “political debates” we should have “issue debates”. So for instance the candidates could have a health care debate. At least that’s what we did in communications class in school…. focused on one subject (or question) and then debate that thoroughly.  Let Americans know what each candidate proposes to do. Give Americans something they can sink their teeth into. Of course that will only work if the candidates really sat down and seriously thought through the situation.

The bottom line is let’s work together as Americans. Not as enemies trying to defeat each other if we do not see eye-to-eye on issues. It is only in this manner that America can truly show it is a world superpower and demonstrate to the world how freedom actually works.

I’ll now turn the soapbox over to someone else.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under 2008 Elections, Civility.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.