"Some Perspective Is Necessary"

John Edwards makes me ... uncomfortable.  I really appreciate that there is a anti-corporate stand-out among Democratic candidates; sincerely I do.  But maintaining one's credibility as a  'stand-out'  often means going to unnecessary extremes.  John Cole notices just such a moment of thoughtless extremism from John Edwards in the Nevada debates.

Edwards took time to clarify that he was the only one of the three to outright oppose nuclear energy. Considering Edwards’s positions on global warming, energy independence, and “Big Oil”, it is baffling that he would dismiss nuclear energy out of hand.

I truly nod in agreement with Cole's assessment:

Excluding nuclear energy from the possible ways to fulfill our energy needs in the future immediately makes you an unserious person, in my book.

Mine too.  I had every intention (born of almost sad resignation) of blackening the oval for Edwards come June, knowing full well that it wouldn't matter.  But the more he attempts to draw distinction between himself and the other Democratic candidates, the more he accepts ideologically 'pure' and hence unsound and unserious positions.  He appears more and more to be playing a game of 'win at all cost', and refusing to think of the practical or pragmatic.  This is only one more example of that phenomenon.  In my happy universe,  ideological purity is the game of the Republicans; they are after all, conservatives.  It goes with their territory and they're welcome to it.  In the real world, it leads to black and white thinking, it speaks of and begs for failure.  It opens the door to unseen consequence and leaves one a slave to the reactions born of a complex and changing system we call "living".  And all the while I paint the Republican party with that brush, I know full well that some Democrats find that level of extremism enticing and necessary.

It isn't necessary, not at all.  As Cole rightly points out, some perspective is.

Comments

[Bob]

"In the real world, it leads to black and white thinking, it speaks of and begs for failure. It opens the door to unseen consequence and leaves one a slave to the reactions born of a complex and changing system we call 'living'."

Well said!

[Mark Tokarski]

Are you sure that nuclear energy is all that it is said to be? Have you resolved the safety issues in your mind? Is not nuclear energy itself a source of greenhouse gas emissions? What I've read of it isn't all that cut and dried.

Anyway, I read your underlying meaning when you talk of "ideological purity". I take that to mean that you adopt the standard liberal position concerning Democrat candidates - give them everything, demand nothing in return, the old recipe for losing. That and Bob Schrumm spells disaster in November.

[Wulfgar]

Mark, it isn't "all that cut and dried", so why should Edwards' opposition to it be so?

And you obviously missed my underlying meaning completely.

[Mark Tokarski]

I'm somewhat sensitized to the "ideological purity" argument from Democrats, which translates into never negotiating with them as they wander off rightward. Maybe you meant something else too, but that comes through clearly.

I've got my own problems with Edwards. Check this out. But to abandon him based on one issue while you are apparently ready to accept any amount of right-tilting wavering from the other two while condemning ideological purity speaks volumes.

[Mark Tokarski]

I leave it to you to place the commas in their proper place in that rambling sentence.