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Loudmouths and the madness of crowds

Yeah, I listened to the president’s speech this evening. I liked it, I had no real issue with it, I would have preferred he keep it to the single issue of border enforcement as I consider all other discussion on immigration to be moot until that problem is solved, but that’s a minor quibble with the speech as a whole.

After it was over, I went on my normal evening run and while I was out I listened to a few of the normal AM talk radio shows just to hear what the general consensus was.

To my total surprise, it seemed that most of the audience was incensed that the President didn’t call for a wide reaching pogrom on the illegal immigrants and that anything short of that was a clear sign that he was just a “limpwristed flop who was just caving in to political pressure” and in the end “not much better than a damn democrat”.

The loudmouths were crying out for blood and utterly furious that the president didn’t give it to them. They didn’t just want a border fence anymore because that just wasn’t good enough; now they wanted a border fence with immigrant heads impaled on it.

I have to tell you that its hell to run when you are spinning around like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Here’s the problem that the President now faces. The Republican party has always had a “knuclehead nativist” stripe a mile wide down its back, and for 60 years the kind of knuckleheaded thinking of “I’d rather lose on principle than win by compromise” kept us away from any sort of political power and deservedly so, because it’s the kind of thing that adolescent children say not adults in the process of running a government of a great country.