If it’s Saturday, it must be time for another Tea Party/Conservative/Republican bashing column, courtesy of Charles M. Blow. Today, Blow laments the resurgence of Conservativism in America as shown in recent polls:
For example, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey released this week found that a majority of Americans supported Arizona’s hostile new immigration law, even as most allowed that the law is likely to lead to more discrimination against legal immigrants. Apparently, for some, there is an acceptable level of collateral damage.
Don’t blame the people, blame your hero in the White House for not enforcing the laws of the land. This is what happens when people are fed up.
A May 7 Gallup poll found that 42 percent of people wanted a Supreme Court nominee who would make the court more conservative, as opposed to only 27 percent who wanted a nominee who would make it more liberal. That was before Elena Kagan was nominated. Afterward, 40 percent rated her as a good or excellent choice, but that was the lowest such rating in recent history, even 4 percentage points lower than Harriet Miers’s.
Call me crazy, but perhaps the people recognize that it is the Court’s duty to apply the Constitution to cases before them as opposed to empathy and life experience a la the Wise Latina.
An Associated Press-GfK poll released this week found that a plurality of people still favor increasing drilling for oil and gas off the coasts even as an unprecedented natural disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico. Environment be damned.
Sorry, Charlie. The people are smart enough to fugure out that the spill in the Gulf was an exception, not the rule and aren’t down with driving clown cars or paying $10.00 per gallon for gas.
And Gallup released a poll on Friday entitled “The New Normal on Abortion: Americans More ‘Pro-Life.’ ” It buttressed the finding from last summer when, for the first time since the question began being asked in 1995, more people self-identified as “pro-life” than as “pro-choice.”
This string of bad news has only compounded an already palpable sense of loss and longing on the left, an enveloping fear of the inevitable: rejection. The right, and most importantly, the middle, unnerved by spending in a recession and unhinged by Obama in the White House, have not bought into the liberal vision of a new America. In fact, they’re increasingly weary of it, if not hostile to it.
Blow’s analysis of the abortion question explains why more people identify with conservative values than liberal. In his world it’s “bad news” that more Americans have taken a pro-life stance. How this can be seen as bad news is beyond me and many others, I dare say.
Never one to disappoint, Blow opines that one of the biggest factors in America’s center-right values is the mere fact that Obama is in the White House. In case you need me translate: Americans can’t stand the thought of a black man in the White House so they are becoming more conservative…because all conservatives are racists. Got it?
What a lazy, predictable argument. If Blow had the desire to look beyond his race-obsessed reasoning, he would discover that Americans have been center-right for much longer than the last 16 months. But he won’t let the facts get in the way of his narrative.
SPITFIRE MURPHY 