The Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts has an interesting column reprinted in Monday’s Virginian Pilot (original here) in which he addresses a reader named Doug. Doug is just the voice of many who criticized Pitts for criticizing Limbaugh. Pitts hones in, though, on something that others have mentioned but bears repeating (emphasis mine):
He seems to buy the notion … that one’s first loyalty as an American is to party or ideology. So that you must defend your guy with mindless zeal even if he is President God-awful and attack the other guy with mindless zeal even if he is so new to the office his business cards haven’t yet come back from the printer. Mindless zeal is the common denominator. What’s right, what’s wrong, what’s best for the country, these things don’t even enter the equation.
Yes, we all have our politics, our prisms, our pet narratives. Nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with embracing an ideology that gives structure and order to your thinking. But for too many of us, ideology becomes identity, becomes an intellectual straitjacket, becomes an excuse not to think. Instead, they wallow in a lazy childishness such that questions involving the life and future of a great nation are treated like stickball or tag, games played with the mindless zeal of childhood, as if nothing of substance were at stake, and victory were its own reward.
Pitts ascribes to the notion, as I do, right and wrong have no party affiliation. That what is good for our community, our Commonwealth, and our nation is good regardless of who is in charge. At the end of the day, we Americans pretty much want the same thing: the opportunity to succeed, to be safe, to live without fear.
We can disagree over how to accomplish these things but we should never get so tangled up in party ideology that we fail to recognize that we are all in this together.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
That highlighted sentence in the second paragraph perfectly describes the Virginia Beach Taxpayers Alliance (VBTA).
I wonder about that. Sometimes it seems as if what some *really* want is someone else to blame and demonize. They’d rather do that than succeed, be safe, and without fear.
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Also related – I’m reading Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough – Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, and thus far, it’s dead on. Also terribly depressing.
You might be right. But I’d at least like to think that those folks are a small minority.
And I hope you’re planning a book review.
When you’ve got mouthpieces like Limbaugh, “I hope Obama fails”, its pretty hard to convince people that you want whats right for America!
The right has nothing but hate-mongers as their front people. Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, they all spew hate! No words of hope, no encouragement to succeed! And then they sit around, wondering why they have lost both the House of Representatives, the Senate and now the White House?
Just as you sat around and wondered the same after the Clinton debacle.
Pres. Obama’s goal is to make the United States into a socialist country. We have seen what socialism has done to nations around the world, time and time again. We do not want that to happen here, so we hope he fails.