Let The Concern Trolling Begin!

Roy Edroso, long may he write, pins Megan McArdle down like a butterfly on cardboard. The futile struggling is painful to see, for disappointment has made Megan testy.

When Obama fails to denounce the capital gains tax in his Inaugural Address, I
expect that will be the last straw. Then McArdle can become the go-to
disgruntled Obama supporter. Orson Scott Card must be kicking himself for not thinking of this first.

A girl's gotta have a gimmick if she wants to get applause, and Megan has embarked on her high-profile career as a concern troll. Megan's been preparing for this moment for a long time, although it was a race to see if Ann Althouse would get there first. However, Ann is easily distracted, and like golden apples thrown down to delay Atalanta, Ann was delayed by a New Yorker article that called her a wingnatrix, and Megan won the race. To the victor go the spoils:

Perhaps I'm getting too testy. For the past two presidential elections, I've voted for the winning candidate. For the past two elections, I've experienced near-immediate buyer's remorse. And for the past two elections, I've been saddened and appalled to watch the people who voted with me display behavior they would be ashamed to find in their three year old in any other context.

I don't mean celebrating their win. I mean celebrating their opponents loss. I mean taking more obvious enjoyment in the fact that the people they disagree with are unhappy, developing fantasies of being the boot stomping into those peoples' faces--forever. Four years ago (or was it six?) I told my commenters to stop gloating, only to be dismissed as a nannying concern troll. They'd earned it, you see. After years of abuse from the other side, they deserved to take joy in the disappointment of others.

How'd that work out, guys?

First of all, anyone who quotes Jonah Goldberg in seriousness isn't going to convince anyone. Second, if Megan is going to accuse anyone of malfeasance, she had better tell us who she is accusing. We're sick to death of these vaguely worded accusations of traitordom and boot stomping and fascism. Show some balls and name names so the people can defend themselves, or shut up.

The "people we disagree with" lost for a damn good reason; incompetence, reckless militancy, neglect, and corruption. If we experience a wild joy at the hope of the possibility of the beginning of the ending of war and corruption, we can live with it. If you can't, give us reasons why we should be humble, modest, and, most of all, not annoying to Ms. Megan McArdle. Otherwise it is your problem, not ours.

Every time we have an election, the partisans confuse the fact that the independents disliked the opposition candidate, with the idea that the independents joined their party. The independents did not want to stomp the Democrats in 2004, and they do not want to stomp the Republicans now. They are not interested in advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, any more than they were preparing to hand the Republicans a "permanent majority" in 2004. And when the various parties act as if it is so--as if the independents had actually voted to join their power-hungry two-minutes-hate, rather than voting for the guy they thought would best shelter them from the vicissitudes of fate . . . well, for the last few elections, they've had their asses handed to them on a silver platter two years later.

This is the Jonah Goldberg Theory of Electoral Success. When your party is elected by a landslide on the explicit agenda of major change, you should rule like the losing party, or you will lose the next election. Thank you for the advice, Megan. We'll take it for what it's worth.

I don't begrudge my fellow Obama supporters an excitement I certainly do not
feel about the many exciting projects that may be undertaken with a large
Democratic congressional majority. But I'm kind of ashamed at the meanness. The
election of the President of the United States not a sports match, or a
schoolyard battle for who's the biggest, meanest bully on the block. I wish so
many Obama supporters were not acting as if it was. I especially wish they
weren't doing so after complaining so bitterly that it wasn't fair four years
ago. If Obama gets blindisded by an intractable financial crisis, those people
will deserve every bit of nastiness that gets heaped on them two and four years
hence. And the undoubtedly equally repulsive Republican gloating from people who
really ought to have learned better will be no less nauseating for all that.

I'm sorry, but that won't work. Everyone and his puppy knows that Bush, the Republican Congress (and their weak Democratic enablers), and the Republican policies of the financial world destroyed the economy. Pinning it on Obama won't work. Nice try, though.

The world changes, and either you change with the times or get left behind. Megan is proving to be a little less nimble than I thought she would be. And Megan, if you've voted twice (and forgotten to register to vote once) and been disappointed every time, you're not a very good judge of character or politics, are you?