Mitt Romney is not alone.
In a world of increasing Internet addiction, the only exercise most of us get these days is from flip-flopping.
Lately an unexpected change in attitudes and beliefs has been thrust upon us, as many of us so-called liberal/progressives currently find ourselves in the strange position of having to defend the American government against the bitter onslaught of Right Wing forces determined to cripple or castrate Washington's ability to monitor and regulate certain types of behavior. The last four years we on the Left have grown increasingly tired of having to explain to older family members or the rural residents of Know-nothing Arkansas that we lefties are not in favor of big government. We want instead good government.
But all our protestations fall on deaf ears. The Right hates the government because the Right enjoys hating the government. As we, too, not so long ago once did.
Many of us lefties, currently intoxicated by the re-election of a smart, decent, level-headed black man to the Oval Office, have forgotten our decades of fear and contempt for, and opposition to a great deal of what the American government has done to Americans and to the citizens of dozens of other countries.
We lefties all too easily seem to forget the American government's liberal use of napalm and Agent Orange on helpless villagers in southeast Asia, resulting in massive cases of birth defects and continued genetic destruction, as well as relative bagatelles such as our wiretapping and attempted blackmail of Martin Luther King and thousands of other citizens. America's long and shameful support of Right Wing death squads in Central and South America, too is well known, all in the name of cheaper bananas, tin and coffee!
The list of American governmental mischief seems endless. Check out a little known episode in American history called Operation Northwoods, a hideous plot devised by the Pentagon in the early 1960's and presented to a horrified John Fitzgerald Kennedy by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These noble warriors actually suggested that American government agents bomb and kill American citizens on American soil in order to blame Castro for the attacks and thereby justify an invasion of Cuba!
The American government has not suddenly become benign and trustworthy simply because a good-hearted man is now at the helm. The Right is right to distrust the government. But unfortunately what they seem to prefer is a government who will gleefully persecute those the Right loathes – gays, minorities, liberals.. and do it cheaply.
We on the Left, instead want a government that behaves decently. Is that really too much to ask?
The Right says yes. That our sappy sentiments are just more naive wishful thinking. Government's true mandate, they tell us, is to spy, punish and prohibit the activities of certain groups of people, while leaving other types of people free to buy, sell and manipulate in peace.
Perhaps we of the Left should listen to one endlessly repeated Right Wing mantra – Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
In this case Government doesn't hurt Americans. Right Wing governments hurt Americans... and everybody else.
..but perhaps there is some reason for hope? Perhaps, in the current (naive?) spirit of outreach and compromise, in exchange for the Right Wing's acquiescence to slightly higher taxes on the very rich and an effort to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, we liberals can agree to ban marriage between humans and goats?
Why not, when such a ban seems so important to these moralists?
