One Year of Commentating

Today, as referenced before, is the one year anniversary of "Make me a Commentator!!!" I started this website as "Make me a Commentator" but decided I needed the extra exclamation points for pizzazz.

A year ago I wrote, "You may wonder what qualifications I have to commentate on the news of the day. I donÂ’t have any, really. I read commentators often, and I have a MA in American History, but besides that my only real qualification is that I have the overwhelming arrogance to believe that my view points might matter to the random reader." That's still largely true. I've read a lot more commentators, though.

One year ago, I also cut off a sentence in mid thought, and now I can't remember what I meant to say.

There is a growing scorched earth policy between our two political parties. Some Liberals and Conservatives want to defeat their political rivals completely. Eliminate them from America. I'll say that I see this tendency more on the Conservative side but I have Conservative friends who believe completely the opposite. I guess it's easy to believe that a victory for the principles one believes in requires defeating those who hold opposite view points. And I guess there's enough anger on both sides to make that seem reasonable. Even rational.

I find myself drawn into it at times. Imagining an apocalyptic war between Conservatives and Liberals for the Soul of America. But that's nonsense. I believe that most of the fighters on both sides of the ideological divide believe in America as much or more than they believe in their individual ideologies.

The words of Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural have great meaning today. "Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. . . . every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."