PrintMarch 9, 2009
It's only bad to want the president to fail if you are a Republican
Many things go down the memory hole when Democrats take office - like how they treated a Republican president at the time he was in office.
It is entirely lost on the media that Rush Limbaugh and many conservatives who want Obama to "fail" are only echoing the sentiments of Democrats who wished devoutly for the same exact thing when George Bush was president.
Hot Air:
Patterico dusts off a 2006 poll from Fox News that plumbs the history of wishing failure a little more thoroughly than the media seems to want to do on their own. The question of wishing success or failure is not new; Fox explicitly asked that very question to its survey respondents. Fifty-one percent of Democrats wanted to see George Bush fail:
Even 34% of independents said they wanted to see Bush fail. This came after Katrina and in the middle of the deluge of sectarian violence in Iraq, and not long before Bush's second midterms. Three months later, Republicans lost Congress and Donald Rumsfeld got the boot. Bush was not terribly popular then, and it didn't get better for him afterwards.
We didn't hear screams of outrage in the media when this survey showed a majority of Democrats wanting "our President" to fail. Nor should we have; our democratic republic uses competing political interests as its own check on extremism. Some people had a legitimate policy interest in hoping that Bush would fail, and some had less legitimate reasons, but few screeched "TREASON" at these results. No one in the media found the idea that an opponent of Bush might wish him failure particularly noteworthy in 2006, either.
Most Republicans are opposing President Obama for the simple, sane reason that his policies are an anathema to their core principles. Asking someone to abandon their principles and blindly and slavishly support a president - especially when the ones doing the criticizing didn't practice what they preached when the shoe was on the other foot - is not only hypocritical but dangerous to liberty.
The idea that the GOP should roll over and play dead for Obama is sickening. The Democrats may be successful in convincing the public that the political opposition should not oppose but rather bark like a puppy and wag their tails whenever Obama proposes something. They have the media to help them with that and I fully expect Republicans and conservatives to suffer for standing up for what they know is right.
But Obama's way is not the only way - despite his lies to the contrary. And if it takes events making a turn for the worse to get the American people to understand that, then we will have the satisfaction of knowing our opposition was not in vain.
I wrote a piece on my own site yesterday dealing with accepting the consequences for standing on principle.
