Giuliani a Liberal? Say what?

Stu Rothenberg is confused, but then I knew that. I mean, how else does someone describe Rudy Giuliani as a liberal? Hello! Just because he doesn't hate women and gay people doesn't mean he's a liberal! It really bothers me that pundits behave as if the only thing that constitutes liberalism is tolerance on cultural issues. Concerns about the environment, race relations, foreign policy, the deterioration of the middle class - it's as if liberalism doesn't exist outside those issues that meet the narrow band of acceptability existing at Georgetown salons. You know, those issues that fit on a postage stamp.

We live in a media age saturated by celebrity, full of political commentators who neither know very little about democracy or politics nor like it very much. An environment entirely devoid of substance and convinced that what the world really needs is more bipartisanship - not more truth. An environment that serves the interests of the comfortable at the expense of a politics of reality.

The reason that an intelligent man like Stu Rothenberg can describe Rudy Giuliani as a liberal is that the beltway discourse has become so corrupted that only a few topics are open for discussion - the rest are condemned to the ideological fringe, no matter how many of the unwashed masses happen to believe them. In fact, it doesn't matter to the D.C. elite what the reality of a given situation is. The only thing that does seem to matter to them is maintaining their cozy little status quo.

Do you want to know why issues don't seem to matter any more? It's because the political class has arbitrarily decided that most issues are boring. It's so much easier to rely on binary classifications with hot emotional resonance like "gay rights" than to consider the complexity not only on those issues, but of the whole universe of problems confronting us. What we have experienced is a generation of infantalization. Whether deliberate or not, the public debate has become so debased as to resemble not the informed argument of committed citizens, but the recorded studio audience track of a stupid T.V. sitcom.

All right. Now that I'm good and angry I can go to work.