A reader writes:
I keep reading you calling the current right "nihilist," but I'm not sure I agree. The tea partiers, neocons and Palin fans are not people who believe in absolutely nothing or reject everything that emerges from the beltway outright. They support the use of torture, want Guantanamo open, support American colonialism and are dyed-in-the-wool supply siders. In short, they want things that either never were (as if Keynesian economic policies never existed) or can't be (expansion of the American empire at gunpoint).
The left, on the other hand? Voters in Massachusetts are ready to toss away a year's worth of work to reform healthcare. For what? Because Brown, while being slightly more atrocious than Coakley from a political standpoint, is more of a "regular" salt of the Earth kind of guy? The type mentioned by one of your readers, who they'd basically have a beer with at the ballpark?
It's tantamount to saying political positions don't matter. But whether someone would be "fun" to hang out with? That does. There's an unsettling sense of abnegation that has taken hold in Massachusetts, but it's from the left, not the right.
For some reason, as you have already mentioned, these voters don't trust themselves to vote Coakley out after this special election. They assume she'll get a 20-year career because of...what, exactly? Their own apathy in voting for an incumbent? Maybe that isn't quite nihilism, because it's not the political system these voters don't believe in. The voters don't believe in the voters.
Another writes:
It is time for the whiny left to shut up and get behind the President. I agree that the right has gone bonkers and wants to burn the place down in the vain hope the voters choose them to rebuild. But the left is no better. The Jane Hamshers and Keith Olbermanns and Arianna Huffingtons are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And make no mistake. The GOP has no interest in governing, no interest in leading and no interest in doing one damn thing except for cutting taxes and torturing terror suspects. The entire future of this country was at stake and Jane Hamsher was pissed because her parents gave her a blue Ferrari instead of a red one.
Even Jon Stewart has lost his way, as he blathers on about an 18-vote majority. He fails to grasp the filibuster and fails to grasp that comparisons to Bush are folly. Bush did nothing except cut taxes and go to war. Only Senators with career death wishes filibuster tax cuts and troop funding.
The left MUST understand that their own differences can wait.