I found a thing to criticize (wow, really?) in Fred Thompson's speech to the Young (Dumb and lots of fun) Republicans, made recently:
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2007/july/0709_thompson_speech1.shtml(I'm not fixin' to link to GOP USA a lot--enjoy it while you can.) He called the Democrats a party of despair--so I thought I'd take a long, hard look at what it is I, a Democrat, despair of--ahem:
I despair of elections fraud, which is like the flip-side of voter fraud:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121604Z.shtmlhttp://www.commondreams.org/views05/0813-29.htmhttp://www.electionfraudnews.com/where it isn't individual voting wrongs, but whole systems of voting possibly being awry, which messes up the representation of the people.
I despair of unilateralism and unitary executive theories, which I think aren't constitutional.
I despair of the watering-down of the US constitution, via-- the Patriot Act, which is kind of like the equivalent of burning the flag, to me.
I despair of a nation so filled with fevered egos, that our media can't stop smiling at the camera long enough to report that they were wrong if they ever said Bush was a moderate, or Cheney was a strong voice on foreign policy, or Donald Rumsfeld was so manly, and guys like Fred Thompson really are so, you know, sexy to voters...it's shit. By the by, a good portion of us despair-partiers thought Reagan was brain-dead long before the Alzheimer's set in, and never did think Nixon was a political genius so much as an opportunist--and many do not wonder that George Bush Senior is the focal point of many conspiracy theories since his pardoning fingerprints are all over the few folks Walsh et al couldn't immunize.
I despair because I love the promise of a nation of, for, and by the people enough to want it to really be so. And I think it might not be there yet. I despair, but only for minutes at a time, because otherwise, I'm working, donating, calling, writing. Democrats do not despair, or we'd already only have one party.