Sunday, October 29, 2006

Selfish Moralism

Welcome to SelfishMoralism.com.

In the aftermath of Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident, some have questioned why the liberal response was over the top. After all, it was a private incident, right?

The answer is as painfully simple as a muzzle full of buckshot to the cheek. It’s because this is just another in an endless chain of hypocritical expectations, but one that has clearly broken the proverbial camel’s back. Cheney’s bad aim is as much a private incident as was President Clinton’s sexual bad aim, if you will. Yet one resulted in someone’s heart attack and lifelong scarring while the other was an indiscretion that happened 100,000 times in the last 24 hours… between consenting adults. Hiding one we’re supposed to allow; hiding the other—not the act, the hiding of it—was impeachable. Yeh, right.

We’re sick of the hypocritical judgment. Judgment that’s being sold to the public as a superior set of values when in fact it is nothing more than pandering to peoples’ lowest values and motivations: self-preservation, self-righteousness, greed and fear. And the pièce de résistance of this political spinmanship? This pile of lowbrow logic has been successfully marketed to Middle America as morality. Bravo Cheneyrovebush!

What the other 49% of us are upset about is that it is not morality. It is selfish moralism, and on a presidential scale. Make that a global scale, a scale that has eroded, in one decade, 200 years of American leadership in morality… eroded honor and humanity that were present even in war… eroded our sharing of wealth and progress despite our insatiable engine of consumption… eroded our global goodwill despite our mistakes.

We’re sick of the sanctioned limbaughism, that in which being a moderate is labeled as a failure to take sides, a failure of commitment, a failure to have guts or worse, to think. Yes, terrorists acting like barbarians are rightly labeled extremists, but think about labeling moderates as cowards. If such venomous spewing is not the very definition of extremism… the seeds of Fascism, I can’t imagine what is.

We’re sick of the anti-science, the anti-intellectualism, the fear mongering, and the way you pronounce “nucular.” We’re sick of the ignorant, macho war that “didn’t cost $200 billion,” which now costs 450. We’re sick of an administration that doesn’t believe in—and can’t successfully manage—programs in America, yet has put itself in the peculiar position of having no alternative but to succeed rebuilding a hostile land.

We’re mad as Hell and yes, we’re going to take it for another two years, but that doesn’t mean anyone should expect us to be nice or fair or God forbid, moral about it.

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Please copy this and send it to everyone who needs to learn the phrase "selfish moralism" as a way to properly label the hateful, destructive politics that it is.

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