A Cheer-Me-Up, if you have the internal wherewithal for one

For those who want to "continue the fight" or at least "not give up the fight," here is a cheer-me-up from Ben Stein, well worth reading.  For anyone who is, like me, stuck on catastrophic and still unable to see anything but dark, at least it doesn't hurt much to read this and it's not too exhausting either (I am running on fumes, if not Empty).

 

A painful night. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan came so close. They worked so incredibly hard. It really brings tears to my old eyes to see it....

... the Romney-Ryan campaign got almost exactly as many votes as the Obama-Biden campaign. That is, with every wind of modern political culture against them, Romney and Ryan drew forth endorsement of conservative principles on a truly virtuoso scale....

 

 

... this seems like a terrible fate. But our party has faced far worse. We were pronounced dead after JFK stole the 1960 election in the cellars of the Chicago City Hall. We were in the morgue after the Goldwater defeat. We were dead and buried after Watergate and the 1974 Congressional elections, when the GOP was just a nub in Congress. We always come back because our principles are better suited to human dignity and human happiness than the other side's. 

 

etc.

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

I agree wholeheartedly with Ben: Our principles ARE better suited to human dignity and human happiness. But evidently a huge number of Americans -- around 60 million of them -- disagree. If we didn't know it before Tuesday night, we know it now: millions of our fellow citizens define "happiness" as wallowing in grievance and self-pity and rancor. Obama knew what he was doing when he said "voting is the best revenge." That was no slip of the tongue. It was his way of saying, "If you're filled with resentment against the well-off and successful, vote for me -- because I share your resentment. Vote for me -- and we'll get our revenge!" And hugh numbers of malcontents and soreheads and bellyachers and haters got the message -- and voted for him. That gave them -- at least momentarily -- the one thing they're temperamentally incapable of holding onto: a feeling of "happiness." As for "human dignity," many of these same kvetchers and faultfinders get a perverse satisfaction from their self-pity -- even though it's as undignified as anything can be. Feeling sorry for yourself is -- for some people -- a helluva lot more gratifying than feeling dignified. That's what's called the Oprah-ization of American culture.