Some of my best friends are Republicans.
None of them are right-wing religious fanatics. Nor, from what they tell me, do any of them favor the repeal of Roe v. Wade and, to varying degrees, they share my concerns over Patriot Act provisions, prisoner treatment at Guantanamo and a repugnancy over Abu Ghraib prison. I would guess they share my belief stem cell research in the US should accelerate. None has an NRA slogan sticking to his bumper.
My Republican friends, as well as my fellow Democrats, even agreed in this last election that all those issues were dwarfed by two over-riding larger issues: terrorism and extricating the U.S. from the lobster trap that is Iraq. On those, we disagreed, often with passion and acrimony about which candidate was the wiser-or less bad--choice. Privately, both sides conceded they didn’t think very highly of their candidate. They just feared the other guy worse.
Our central argument, on reflection, could be boile down to: “My jerk is better than your jerk.” Okay sometimes the language was stronger than that. In the end more people went with their jerk.
Winston Churchill said that in a democracy we always get precisely who we deserve. It seems to me that America and the world deserved better than either party offered us.
Maybe next time, we'll do better. Maybe not.
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