[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
What a relief and pleasant surprise! Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, showing a degree of open-mindedness and generosity that is all too rare both from him personally and the Washington Post generally, magnanimously notices that there are some faint indications, some glimmers of hope, of “a growing if self-interested recognition that intolerance is doing the GOP, and conservatism, real damage.”
“It would be premature to say,” Milbank hastens to say, no doubt to reassure his fellow tribalists that he continues to share sacrosanct tribal beliefs that the GOP and conservatives are still both stupid and evil, “that the party of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock has fundamentally changed; conservatives appear likely to nominate Rep. Steve King (Iowa), an anti-immigration hard-liner and all-around bomb-thrower, to be their GOP Senate candidate in Iowa next year.”
“But,” he concludes, “there are hopeful signs.”
Hope, it would appear, springs eternal in the liberal heart (or perhaps that’s infernal: “extremely troublesome, annoying, etc.; outrageous: an infernal nuisance“) — hope that Republican evil is not immutable, that wise (but firm) leadership displaying truth by example and disseminating it via the informed and progressive (but I repeat myself) organs of culture, news, and education might one day lift a few conservatives up at least to the lower rungs of the moral and spiritual ladder occupied temporarily by less developed liberals while they are learning the progressive catechism.
UPDATE [4 April]
Either Obama has been reading too much Milbank or Milbank has been listening to too much Obama.
Hot Air quotes The Weekly Standard quoting Obama at a recent fundraiser in San Francisco —
Look, my intention here is to try to get as much done with the Republican Party over the next two years as I can, because we can’t have perpetual campaigns. And so I mean what I say. I am looking to find areas of common ground with Republicans every single day. I want to make sure that we’re working together to stabilize our finances…. I want to get an immigration deal done. I want to find some common-sense gun safety legislation that we can get done. And I do believe that there are well-meaning Republicans out there who care about their kids just as passionately as we do.
— and adds:
Not all Republicans, mind you. Probably not even most. But the ones willing to vote for Obama’s agenda? Yeah, we can probably give them the benefit of the doubt on whether they love their kids as much as liberals. There’s no hard proof that they’re out there — it’s a matter of “belief” — but he’s staying optimistic.
