Pitts Nails It

After Leonard Pitts criticized Rush Limbaugh last weekend for his stated desire for Obama to fail, Pitts got plenty of emails, as you can imagine, from the lunatic right wing, including one from "Doug."

``I see your (sic) Mr. Sensitive when it comes to someone saying something bad about your guy. But I had to go 8 years watching, reading, listening to you ravage George W. Bush. Just who has the Class here?''

His subject line: ``you ravage Bush we ravage Obama.''

This is the kind of tit-for-tat political gamesmanship you'll see practiced at any fringe rightwing blog, including South Florida's own Babalu. Democrats do it, so we do it, they like to say. Pitts responds...

I plead guilty to the charge, by the way. I did, indeed ''ravage'' Bush. He was, in my estimate, the worst president in memory if not the worst ever. Not ''ravaging'' him would have amounted to journalistic malpractice. Let Obama turn trillion dollar surpluses into trillion dollar deficits, sacrifice lives and treasure in an ill-conceived war of choice, preside over a government whose ineptitude is exceeded only by its arrogance, and I'll ''ravage'' him, too. You bring the feathers, I'll bring the tar.

But then, I also ''ravaged'' Bill Clinton when his inability to keep his zipper closed precipitated a constitutional crisis. I called him ''sluttish,'' a ''human oil slick,'' ''Gomer,'' ''unprincipled, formless, opportunistic,'' ''manipulative slime,'' a ''sad, sex-addled liar'' and, my personal favorite, ``President Hefner.''

The right conveniently overlooks that on a consistent basis, Democrats are sometimes harder on their own than conservatives are. But Pitts' next observation hits in out of the park...

I bet that will surprise Doug. He seems to buy the notion, propounded by the likes of Limbaugh and lapped up by millions of Dougs and Dougettes, that one's first loyalty as an American is to party or ideology. So that you must defend your guy with mindless zeal even if he is President God-awful and attack the other guy with mindless zeal even if he is so new to the office his business cards haven't yet come back from the printer. Mindless zeal is the common denominator. What's right, what's wrong, what's best for the country, these things don't even enter the equation.

Yes, we all have our politics, our prisms, our pet narratives. Nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with embracing an ideology that gives structure and order to your thinking. But for too many of us, ideology becomes identity, becomes an intellectual straitjacket, becomes an excuse not to think. Instead, they wallow in a lazy childishness such that questions involving the life and future of a great nation are treated like stickball or tag, games played with the mindless zeal of childhood, as if nothing of substance were at stake, and victory were its own reward.

I haven't seen it said much better.

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