leifw

The opinion piece tells us that we should support the President's proposal for no merit of its own other than the personage of the its author. Given the author's purported leadership role in the party, I hope that he does not believe such obsequiousness is requisite for inclusion in the Republican Party. Regardless of the similarity of a leader's party affiliation to your own, blindly following an elected leader's proposals is a terrible idea. To quote a former president:

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Theodore Roosevelt

Also bothersome about the opinion piece is that it equates disagreeing with the President with attacking his person or character when it says that "We should follow him rather than backbiting him." The American Heritage Dictionary defines backbite as "To speak spitefully or slanderously about a person." The author seems to be saying that we can either agree with the President or we can call him names, but we cannot have a dispassionate, rational conversation in which we disagree while respecting each other. I understand how the author could've easily arrived at this conclusion by watching television pundits duke it out on a level which glorifies a playground bully's epithets.

posted by Leif Wickland @ 1:04 PM