Now Sullivan often annoys me. His blog suffers from an over abundance of posts that are mostly useless. But from time to time he does have something to say. The whole post is worth a read.
As an actual thoughtful conservative (who knew any were left?) he’s over obstruction for it’s own sake at the cost of doing the right thing for the country:
The other brutal truth is that the opposition has nothing substantive to offer to remedy this. If all they’ve got is keeping the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 a year, they really have got nothing. What they do have is cultural symbolism and the exhausted right-left tropes that were trotted out at the mercifully vacuous parade of God and Country on the Mall with Beck and Palin. (A cynical atheist’s parody of such vacuousness can be read here.) Maybe in power, by some miracle, the Tea Party Republicans will actually propose the long-term massive cuts in entitlements they claim to believe in. But I don’t believe it for a second. I don’t believe they are in any way serious about spending restraint and are only serious about their bewilderment at the real America where racial, religious and cultural diversity is a fact, where illegal immigration has been plummeting, where gay marriage is winning, where legal abortion will never go away, and where the new empire the last administration embarked upon has bankrupted us for a generation at least.
And this, in the end, must be what our politics is about: substantive policy responses to profound crises inherited from the past. Obama’s call for transportation infrastructure investment is one tiny but real response and no panacea but it’s paid for and it’s something. His persistent attempt to get a real two-state solution in Israel-Palestine is unlikely to succeed given the forces arrayed against it in Washington and Tehran but it is necessary if we are to win this long war against Jihadism. His endurance in Afghanistan is, in my view, a tragic mistake, but anyone who claims that withdrawal would not have appalling moral consequences and great strategic risks is lying to you. His diplomatic and economic isolation of Iran’s coup regime may also fail to prevent the Revolutionary Guards getting a nuclear capacity, but the alternative – a military strike – would initiate a new round of global religious warfare of terrifying gravity, where the Islamists would have the moral high-ground of being attacked first. His success in bringing a modicum of healthcare security to the working poor is also a work in progress but again, the practical alternative on the table is … what exactly?
I dig Sullivan. Seems fairly rational and willing to discuss issues without a lot of talking points BS.