The "Civility" Thing

In the last couple of days, Jeb Bush has tut-tutted about 'civility' in politics.  He makes the point that a lot of Lefties really, truly, believe that what they prescribe is the best solution.

(Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a Lefty who really, truly, believed that Lefty-ism was best for the country--until he realized that actually, it was NOT.  Then he did the *cough* right thing.  No, he didn't switch parties; he simply dissected the most pernicious social programs with intellectual rigor.)

Well,  It's undoubtedly true that some Lefties believe that their agenda is best for the nation.  But I seriously doubt that Teh Won does.  If that were the case, he might want to be consistent.  But he's not.

In 2008, he castigated GWBush for increasing the national debt by "$4Tn in 8 years."  (On the facts, he's wrong; it was only $2Tn.)  But he also called Bush "unpatriotic" for that action.

So when others like Perry suggest that it is "almost treason" if Bernanke were to QE3 "for political purposes" before the '12 elections, Perry gets slammed?

Puh-leez.

Obama's sole interest is election and re-election.  He has no interest in the Constitution; no interest in the Rule of Law, no interest in basic business economics--which have a great deal of impact on the nation's economics--and no interest in moral Right Order.

He deserves everything that he gets from the opposition party and the population.  Un-patriotic, subversive, and inimical to the long-term health of the country?  Guilty on all counts.

Podhoretz (with whom we frequently disagree on foreign entanglements):

Of course, unlike Mr. Westen, we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as "a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election." On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama's goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

...coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s...

Here, Podhoretz and I disagree again:

I disagree with those of my fellow conservatives who maintain that Mr. Obama is indifferent to "the best interests of the United States" (Thomas Sowell) and is "purposely" out to harm America (Rush Limbaugh). In my opinion, he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country. 

But I emphatically agree with Messrs. Limbaugh and Sowell about this president's attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it. That is why my own answer to the question, "What Happened to Obama?" is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president

Frankly, Podhoretz makes a distinction without a difference in claiming that 1) Obama is not 'purposely out to harm America' and 2) that Obama is 'an anti-American leftist.'

Straining "civility" by holding mutually contradictory truths will lead to a mental breakdown.