Opinion: In today’s pages: Pompous progressives and Romney retrospectives
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Gregory Rodriguez explores the unabashedly pro-American culture along the northern Mexican border, and Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich shakes the U.S. out of its NATO pipe dream. New America Foundation senior fellow Andrés Martinez bashes California’s leaders for dragging their feet on free-trade agreements, and cartoonist Jimmy Margulies targets ‘electability’ issues. Writer and self-hating liberal Garret Keizer wonders why progressives can be so annoying:
I mean that mix of blithe presumption and fussy preference that so often marks the self-described ‘progressive.’ I mean that ostentatiously dissatisfied person whose every gesture displays passive-aggressive tendencies, who gets most of his information from the blogosphere and most of his minimal get-up-and-go from a caffeinated drink prepared to his exacting specifications. I mean a person who belongs, as my wife will gently remind me, to ‘our tribe,’ whether I like it or not.There’s the rub. I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. I don’t like the fact that so many of the people who share my politics are so obnoxious. I don’t like the fact that I am often seized by an urge to grab one of them by the collar and say, ‘Do you want to know what makes decent, seemingly rational people vote for a character like Bush? It is their utter distaste for characters like you.’ Or should I say, ‘for characters like us’?
The editorial board presents a plan to ‘Reimagine LAUSD,’ and marks teachers down for poor attendance and participation in UTLA affairs:
As the first debate got underway, 16 candidates sat at the front of the multipurpose room at Grover Cleveland High School Facing htem were 16 audience members scattered among 240 chairs set in neat rows. Right there, that could be the biggest challenge contfronting United Teachers Los Angeles ...
Readers bid Mitt Romney a none-too-fond farewell. Ken Shmidt makes the best of the erstwhile Republican hopeful’s decision:
At last we have a candidate who has recognized that it was his patriotic duty to drop out of the presidential race. May we hope that this becomes a trend.