Ragged Clown

It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing…


Brothers and Sisters of the Left

October
2006

For the last four years,

those of us on the left who saw this coming – and saw a hundred other issues coming, from abrogation of the wall between church and state to the ballooning deficit – we have spent the last five years being called every ugly, vicious name in the book because we tried to stop this, because we tried to warn the American people: haters, traitors, pussies, weenies, liars, partisans, hacks, wacks, radicals, commies, atheists, morally confused, mentally challenged and anything, anything except patriots who love this country and everything it stands for – or ought to stand for.

but in recent months, Andrew Sullivan and his ilk have been telling us that, although we were right all along we were right for the wrong reasons. The people who have really been betrayed are the ones who supported the war from the beginning but didn’t get the war they were expecting. Our anger was petty, partisan anger but

the anger of the betrayed and decent right and center is deeper.

Today is a momentous day. Today, finally, Sullivan concedes that we might have had a point all along

On these grounds, I have indeed come to see that many, many liberals are indeed my brothers and my sisters. And increasing numbers of conservatives as well, thank God. For some on the far left, Bush could never have done any right, ever. I’m not going to exculpate the hate-filled parts of the far-left. But many, many others on the left were right about these people in power; and I was wrong. I threw some smug invective their way and, in retrospect, I am ashamed of it. Sure, I recognized my error before the last election, but that doesn’t excuse it. Sure, some of it was just misunderstanding each other, in a climate of great fear, and some of it was just my arrogance that I was right. But that doesn’t excuse it all either.

Now, if the people of Texas would just draft a big letter of apology to the Dixie Chicks (“Sorry, chicks. Maybe we did overract just a little bit”) my faith in we the people will be restored.