The L-Word Reappears

David Edwards at Raw Story tells us about Ari Fleischer's assessment of the election. "Watch-What-You-Say" Ari, who was GeeDubya's press secretary for a time, in essence says Republicans are going to have to work on appealing to Hispanic voters, because they're never going to do anything to gain support from LGBTQs and women. Yes, women. The Republican Party, according to Speech-Squelching Ari, is writing off women:

After a stinging election night defeat, President George W. Bush’s former White House secretary still says that the Republican Party will never support LGBT rights and reproductive rights for women.

“The big issue that Republicans are going to have to wrestle with is the Hispanic issue,” Ari Fleischer explained after President Barack Obama’s defeat of GOP hopeful Mitt Romney made it clear that the country was more liberal than he had expected.

“It’s not the social issues,” he insisted. “You’re not going to make the party pro-choice and pro-gay rights and think you’ve made the Republican party the party that’s the popular party. We have a party like that. It’s the Democratic Party.”

“But the Republican Party used to be against abortion,” CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted. “In the past year, they have become identified with opposition to contraception. That is, you know, moving backwards at a pace that is astonishing and politically disastrous.”

...

Thank you, Ari Fleischer. If anyone on my side of the field had said any of the things that you said, the right-wing noise machine would have howled in outrage. But really... when YOU say the GOP has screwed the pooch, largely because they will never try to appeal to Latinos, gays and women, who will contradict that?

But the most heartening thing I noted was not Ari's public proclamation of GOP suicidal tendencies, but David Edwards's use of that word. I've seen it several times, in positive contexts, in the past two days in a variety of columns.

What word?

The L-word.

"LIBERAL."

It's a word that seemed to have been banished from public discourse from the days in which George H.W. Bush used it as a pejorative until this week... approximately 24 years.

It's going to take me a while to reorient myself. I grew accustomed to living in the political wilderness...

Not Conservative Enough?

Paul Krugman highlights the surprising context in which we enter the last few weeks before the presidential election, comparing conventional wisdom with the facts on the ground ("... the Republicans appear to be in a shambles — while the Democrats seem incredibly united, and increasingly, dare I say it, enthusiastic") and the astonishing poll numbers in literally every major poll except Rasmussen. Krugman attributes the status and direction to the GOP's insistence on an ideology-driven election (in which Democrats are less strident about social issues but surely better aligned with moderate Americans than increasingly extreme Republicans) and possibly to Obamacare, which at least in theory will result in 50 million more Americans with medical coverage than if it had not passed. His conclusion, somewhat of a surprise, is a welcome thought to any American with "the conscience of a liberal":

All of this in turn has an implication that Republicans won’t like — assuming that Rasmussen doesn’t have a special insight into the truth denied to all other pollsters, and that Obama does in fact win with a solid margin. The right is already set up to blame poor Mitt, claiming that he lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. But that’s not what we’re seeing; it looks as if voters are rejecting the right’s whole package, not just the messenger.

From Prof. Krugman's lips to God's ear, as the saying has it. Is it even remotely possible that after a lifetime fighting ever stronger religious fundamentalists, social conservatives, and the "anti's" (anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, anti-Asian, anti-Native-American, and most especially, anti-intellectual), my generation at long last is on the threshold, entering a period of some... maybe not much, but some... genuine hope for a measure of sanity in American society?

Hope and vote and work; hope and vote and work...

ASIDE: I wanted a graphic for this post, a symbol of liberalism in its broadest sense. Athena's owl occurred to me, but that bears additional connotations. So I searched Google Images for "liberalism" and found that, while few if any positive icons for liberalism exist, our adversaries have outdone themselves. Indeed, the ratio of negative to positive images associated with liberalism, if you believe Google, is surely a thousand to one. So for the moment we will do without. Apologies for the bare-text post.