Excellent Post on Politics

Here is a post from T. Rex's Guide to Life:

Scoring Political Points

I'm pretty tired of hearing conservatives accuse liberals of trying to "score political points." Anyone who makes such an accusation is part of the problem. Such people just don't understand anything, it seems. They see the whole thing as a game, wherein whoever gets the most points "wins." In this game, there are certain times when you stop "playing" the game to observe a moment of silence for some particular occasion (not that they actually observe the moment of silence, but they condemn us for not doing so). But those of us on the left don't look at this as a game and we aren't trying to score points in some mythical "game."

The way we look at all of this stuff is on one measure -- how does this help the American people and make America a better place (and by extension, the people of the world and making the world a better place). Everything we do and say is designed around that one measure -- making America better. We don't care who wins as long as the people win. If we thought that conservatives in all branches of government would actually make America (and the world) a better place, then we'd certainly support them being in place. The problem is, that isn't the case. They're in control and things are getting worse both here and abroad. That's why we attack them -- so that we can shame them into doing the right thing, or, at a minimum, make the people aware enough of their crap in order to vote for different candidates.

One way you can tell the difference between them and us is that when a Democrat is in charge, we continue to attack them for not doing a good enough job, when a Republican is in charge, they check their critical thinking skills at the door. We know that neither party is going to 100% do what it can to improve our country, so we are critical of both. They think their party is God's gift (literally in many cases) and can't get past that no matter how bad someone fucks up.

They call us Bush haters and rightfully so in many cases (I'm not a big fan of hate, hate leads to the dark side and all that). But they get the chronology mixed up. They think we've just decided abstractly to hate Bush or that we hate him because he's conservative or Republican and we construct things to support that hate. That's moronic. Those of us who hate (or dislike) Bush do so because of the things he does and says, not because of some abstract concept. It's concrete. It's practical. We dislike him because of the things he does that make our country (and previously, the state of Texas) worse than not only it can be, but should be.

We're not trying to "score political points" by pointing to the failures in the Katrina situation, we're trying to hold accountable those that screwed up so royally in this situation (and much of the damage is due to human error -- government official human error) and prevent the same type of thing (or worse) from happening again in the future. Fuck your points and fuck your game, this is about our country and our world and whether or not we should make it a better place. Liberals think we should and have an idea of how to do it. Conservatives don't.