Quote of the Day: "They're betting on failure"

So far, the best quote I've seen today comes from Rep. Gerry Connolly in the Washington Post. Check it out.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat who represents Northern Virginia, said McDonnell is "ducking" issues because he and his fellow Republicans are mistakenly betting that Democrats' proposals, including the federal stimulus package and the health-care overhaul, will fail and that the economy will not rebound.

He said that there are signs the economy is starting to turn around and that Deeds and the Democrats will benefit when consumer confidence rebounds later this year.

"They're betting on failure," Connolly said. "That's a very risky strategy."

I like this quote - "They're betting on failure" - because it sums up the entire conservative philosophy over the past 30 years or so: sabotage government so that it doesn't work as well as it can, demonize it in the eyes the public, then count on the "failure" of government - the one that their irresponsible actions and incompetent policies caused - to persuade (at least some) voters to turn to them in exasperation.

A perfect case in point is exactly what we have now: the Democrats attempting to clean up the huge mess after 8 disastrous years under George W. Bush (6 of those years also had a Republican Congress), during which we ran up huge deficits, got bogged down in Iraq (cost: thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars), ignored pressing human and physical infrastructure problems here at home, turned surpluses into deficits in order to give huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans who didn't need the money, politicized everything (e.g., the science of stem cells, climate change), created a poisonous atmosphere in which anyone who opposed President Bush or the war in Iraq was a "traitor," did nothing to break our oil addiction, let the housing bubble grow until it ultimately burst like an aneurysm, ignored all kinds of risky schemes on Wall Street, sullied our nation's reputation as a moral beacon through its violation of the Geneva Conventions and our own laws on treatment of prisoners, etc., etc.

And after all that, after all those years when they didn't make a peep, now the tea baggers, Rush, Glenn, and "don't tread on me" crowd are angry? Now we get right-wing talking heads and politicians openly wishing for President Obama to "fail" so they can "break him?" If Democrats had done this to Bush, what would the right wingnuts have said? Probably something like, "they're traitors for wishing our great leader to fail." They also might have said something like, "liberals are always betting on America to fail." Well, guess what, liberals overwhelmingly didn't do that, but the right wing is doing it, every day, and not even trying to hide it. If they'd look in the mirror for a change, honestly, they'd have to conclude - by their own bizarre reasoning - that they are the "traitors" to America, betting on failure (and fearmongering) in order to get back into power. Which, after all is said and done, is the only thing they really care about.