Enough The Sore-Loser Party
The first resort of a sore loser is to gripe about how the game itself was unfair, how the other team doesn't play nice, how the very act of winning is all the proof necessary that the other side will ''do anything'' to win. The second resort is to simply make junk up about the other guy that makes you feel better about yourself.
''The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry,'' writes Jane Smiley, a woman who couldn't catch a clue if you used one as a pestle and her brain pan as the mortar. Smiley's now-famous hissyfit places a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the Republican base is ''ignorant'' while the Democratic one is enlightened. A similar point was made by the British Daily Mirror, one of whose headlines asked, ''How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?''
One might ask if the Democrats really want to place so much emphasis on ''ignorance'' of the base as a defining difference between the parties. By all means let's break out the number-two pencils and pit the homeschoolers, tractor drivers, and Sunday-school teachers against the voters who wouldn't have shown up at the polls lest they miss a chance to meet P-Diddy.
There are other complaints as well. Take the two leading liberal columnists at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. As we all know, one's a whining self-parody of a hysterical liberal who lets feminine emotion and fear defeat reason and fact in almost every column.
The other used to date Michael Douglas. But both of them have been writing a string of columns insisting that the Bushies ran a campaign of ''divisiveness,'' ''primitivism,'' and ''fear.'' To be fair, and to everyone's surprise, Krugman's post-drubbing column wasn't a whine-fest so much as a cri de coeur about how his whininess was justified all along.
The column read like a quickly dashed-off buck-up memo about how Democrats should keep fighting. Conveniently Krugman is now going into hiding for a few months to work on an economics textbook. (Nothing like telling the troops to tough it out in the trenches as you head to the bunker.)
Thank goodness Dowd has picked up the slack. Her columns of late aren't the clever highbrow snarks they once were; once she knew how to sweeten the bile. Now her op-ed page real estate hits your desk like a bucket of vomit with some Body Shop potpourri sprinkled across the surface.
By Smiley's now-famous