I saw this headline yesterday -- "Conservatives home in on 'ObamaRail'" -- but I passed up the story's content, in part because of its smothering predictability but also because I swear they're wearing me down: if it's smart, if it's infrastructural, if it's economically sound and if it's anything to do with Obama, then they're agin it. This adolescent anti-ism is exhausting.
Every rational step forward is either another instance of intolerable federal bullying or it's European socialist skulduggery devised to enslave our children. It's foreign, it's suspect, it's unAmerican, it's alien -- it's just too damn intelligent for the right.
Things have got so bad, it's also spooking some of their own: "The vehemence of Republican critics has surprised even some Republicans, who say transportation issues used to find more bipartisan support."
We all heard the president propose high-speed rail in his State of the Union address, a recommendation that in saner times would have triggered a booming chorus of House and Senate Democratic endorsements of a Democratic president's economic leadership. Instead -- and this troubles as much as right-wing reflexiveness -- in The Hill story we find the most urgent voice of rail advocacy in one Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union.
You know, Dems, when you beg someone to lead, you're supposed to have his back.