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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Sore losers undermine majority rule

Back in the day when I was contemplating running for a Student Government Office in high school my Daddy gave me the following advice,(para quoting) if you can't stand to lose don't run. Someone will win fair and square and someone will lose fair and square. You will either know the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. If you lose, lose like a winner. My 9th grade Civics teacher taught us the minority must be heard but the majority rules. Present day Politicos evidently learned different lessons from their parent(s)/mentor(s)/teacher(s). I've never seen such a bunch of sore losers.

Ironically Senator Joe Lieberman started the sore loser syndrome. Liberman was a gracious loser before he was a sore loser. Florida Governor Charlie Crist couldn't stand to lose so he bowed out of the republican primary to run as a spoiler, I mean Independent. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski couldn't stand to lose so she is waging an an aggressive write in campaign.

Sweet Home Alabama caught a case of sore loser syndrome starting with the Birmingham Mayoral Elections. Followed by the Tim James recount. A suit was filed to remove republican gubernatorial nominee Robert Bentley from the ballot and delay the election. And there are rumblings of a write in campaign waged by die hard supporters of the losers aka the minority. I sure do miss the good old days when the candidate with the most votes won. *Sigh*

The losers are turned into the sore winners.

The Sore Winners are easy to find. They are most visible at their flagship, Fox News, which dominates both cable news and the political conversation and yet is always embattled, defending itself against the heathen. They are loudest not only on secular talk radio, but also in Christian broadcasting, which tells its listeners that a nation that remains a nation of Christians rather than a Christian nation is a nation that has turned against them. This is not to say, however, that the Sore Winners are strictly a political phenomenon, manipulated, as some would have it, by their masters in the media or by the money men from Wall Street. No, what makes the Sore Winners such a force in American politics is that their anger is so personal.


And that's what scares me.

Worrying about what someone who doesn't think about you thinks about you: this is the essence of Sore Winnerdom, and it is no accident that it also the essence of the Republican animus. The Republican party was small and hidebound — the party of country-club corporatists, and the range-war West — until, with the Reagan Revolution, it began grafting unto itself the legions of the disaffected: the Christianists, the Southerners, the blue-collar workers displaced by the collapse of America's industrial base and estranged from the unions that failed them. The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is part of an ongoing migration of the perpetually petulant, a political phenomenon grounded in a demographic one: the creation of a class of baby-boom retirees who have been deprived of meaningful work but given personal computers as Christmas presents. The skin on the Republican Party's "Big Tent" is by definition thin, and under it gathers a volatile throng of people with nothing in common but the fear that outside its environs someone is laughing at them — or simply having a better time.



And that's what scares me.

I can certainly empathize and understand the agony of defeat when your candidate loses a hard fought election. I didn't think the pit in my stomach would ever go away after the 2000 Presidential election. It was like deja vu all over again in 2002. I went to bed Don Siegelman was the Governor, when I I woke up Bob Riley was the governor. I had to accept the majority rule and get over it like a good American. How will the losers react if they don't win on Tuesday?(warning language)
if, as the most optimistic polling shows is possible, the Republicans don't win back the House of Representatives and lose a good many of the close Senate races next Tuesday, the reaction on the right will be violent. There will be a number of instances of Democratic headquarters vandalized, people who support Democrats will be assaulted, bomb threats will be called in, and there may even be an alarmingly well-organized, but supposedly grassroots and spontaneous, riot or two.


That's what I'm afraid of.

On the other hand I fear the Politicians with the most dangerous,wrong ideas are poised to win the Congress and the State Legislature.
Shaken by an assault on their assumptions, many Americans become more adamant in defense of discredited ideology.


I pray a majority of the Americans will beware of fears racist temptation. I also pray the American minority loves their country more than they hate President Obama.
[T]he truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, ... but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? ... There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you...


If you can't stand to lose don't run.

1 comment:

Redeye said...

Update h/t jackandjillpolitics
In case you don’t know, there was a story that broke yesterday that Bill Clinton was contacted by the Charlie Crist campaign to try and get Kendrick Meek out of the Senate Race.

http://www.jackandjillpolitics.com/2010/10/the-wrong-in-the-florida-senate-race/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JackAndJillPolitics+%28Jack+and+Jill+Politics%29