03.28.09
Wanting the President to “fail”…
…as Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly and unapologetically said, what does this mean?
Spinmongers followed up by saying that he (or they) didn’t want “the President” to fail, but they wanted “his policies” to fail. Fred Thompson said it again, and so has Bobby Jindal. So what does that mean?
What does it mean to America if the President “fails”, or if his policies “fail”? What does it mean to “want” the President or his policies to fail? What do we think it means? What do the people who say it intend to convey? Does it matter?
In the Space Child’s Mother Goose, a wonderful old book of poetry parodies ostensibly for children, but full of allusions to contemporary life and fiction (as of course the original nursery rhymes were), there is a poem that goes something like this:
See the little phrases go,
Watch their funny antics.
The men who make them wiggle so
Are teachers of semantics.
The words go up, the words go round,
And make a great commotion.
But all that lies behind the sound
Is hebetude Beotian.
Hover for a tooltip.
Here’s how I see it: For the President to fail, it means his policies have failed. If his policies have failed, it means he has failed too.
But his policies are the only thing that can pull us out of this mess. The Republican “plan” is a pamphlet with lots of pictures with circles and arrows. It has no numbers in it.
If the plan fails, America fails, and American people suffer. They lose more jobs and homes.
But wanting the plan to fail is a very different thing from thinking it will fail. It is acknowledging that it may succeed. And if the plan succeeds and America gets pulled out of this morass, the Democrats get credit and the Republicans will have an epic fail on their hands. So they have to make it fail, or they are doomed.
All the people who are trying to claim that wanting Obama to fail is not the same as wanting the country to fail are just playing games with words. They know exactly what they mean, and so do we.
