Every regime needs a loyal opposition. It tends to balance things out, to modulate the "in" party's excesses, to crystallize leaders' thinking. And the republic is the better for it.
President Obama and the Democratic majority don't have that benefit right now.
What they have is loony street theater and thugs, birthers and Tea Partiers and talk radio screamers who (along with an absurd number of "legitimate" public servants) call them socialists and Nazis, and congressmen who heckle loudly from Capitol Hill legislative chambers.
And given, in the midst of all this racket, the deafening silence of Republicans who ought to be denouncing and distancing themselves from these nutjobs, the current incarnation of the GOP manifestly deserves to be considered enabler and apologist for the worst of them.
The problem is not just that a venerable American political institution with a long and honorable tradition is utterly out of control. It's that its excesses are so completely incapable of correcting Obama's own.
If everything Obama (or rather, that rough beast known as Obama-Pelosi-Reid) does is not merely wrong, but stupid, evil and fundamentally un-American, why even bother listening to a nonstop litany of bile?
The safe route of weenie diplomacy says I make some disclaimer here about how "both sides are equally guilty."
To read the complete column, visit www.ledger-enquirer.com.
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