DIVIDER-IN-CHIEFPresident Adams Should Show More Sympathy for the Plight of Conservatives
By Daniel Beeks, Opinion Columnist for the Astoria Legend Once upon a time, political debate in Astoria was open to everyone. Our greatest Presidents - John Burke, Alexander Logan, Daniel Jessup, Emmauel Dewey - all built their greatness on a foundation of bipartisan compromise. They understood that the United States was at its best when it listened to both the left and the right. Unfortunately, President David Jefferson Adams, unfortunately, has followed in a less honorable and more recent tradition, forged by Presidents like Lee Sarason and Jeremiah Hull. This tradition sees tragedies like the shootout in Morehead, Kentucky not as a sign that the country is fatally divided and in need of healing, but as a new wedge to further elevate their political agendas at the expense of those who disagree with them.
President Adams’s comments at the Memorial Day ceremony were unnecessary and made a partisan farce of a solemn national moment. He has refused to walk back his remarks even after an outpouring of outrage from Democratic Party politicians and other conservative activists. Now Adams’s political allies and followers are joining in with salvos of their own, making unsubstantiated and harmful pronouncements blaming the Democratic Party for inciting the violence. The Oath Keepers are an unregulated militia, and a public menace. They should be brought to justice for their deeds. But to try and beat Astorian conservatism with their body of work is to merely inflame future extremists into following their lead. It also continues to alienate ordinary Astorians who see themselves virtually disenfranchised, with two flavors of Liberalism to choose from in January.
If President Adams is serious about his pledge during the campaign to serve as a uniting force, he should start listening more earnestly to the complaints of voters who reliably send Democratic politicians to the House and Senate every election. He should start following in the footsteps of his self-proclaimed role model, President John Burke, and incorporate good ideas even if they come from outside his political circle. Continuing to plow forward with policies like refugee resettlement, dismissing those who have legitimate economic and national security objections as “racists” (a word which seems to have been broadened to include any disagreement with the Progressive Party line) or ignorant xenophobes does nothing to solve Astoria’s most pressing issue of the 21st century: the gap between those who are heard and those who are silenced.
BUILDING CASTLES IN THE SKY
Daniel Beeks Should Listen to What His Conservative Friends are Actually Saying
By Eddie Glassdrift, Opinion Columnist for the Astoria Legend
Daniel Beeks has a very easy job. No matter what issue he is asked to write a column on, he merely has to repeat the same points: 1) In the Mythical Past, there was no partisanship; 2) despite everyone in this Mythical Past always agreeing to compromise and meet in the middle, the good solutions always ended up being conservative ones because the Silly Liberals always realized the folly of their dreaming; 3) this Mythical Past ended when the 21st century began (totally unrelated to the election of Lee Sarason, Astoria’s first gay President) and the Silly Liberals began shoving their pipe dreams down the throats of “ordinary Americans.” Beeks then gets to copy and paste the same end paragraph onto every column, where he calls for the current Liberal or Progressive President to “compromise” with conservatives by totally conceding to all of their demands. This, Beeks promises, will finally win over those Democratic Party voters who have stood by their party throughout the racism, homophobia, and xenophobia of the past two decades.
Curious that Mr. Beeks never seems to use his column, which he certainly believes is influential and widely-read, to try and convince those Democratic Party voters, politicians, and donors to maybe try and clean up their own Party before they start making demands of others. I say curious, but it isn’t really; because Mr. Beeks isn’t in the business of offering sound and rational political advice. If he was, he would have published a column somewhere around the fourth week of the 1999-2000 presidential election campaign, urging all of his readers to take a hard look at the party embracing bigotry of all shades in a desperate attempt to block President Sarason from winning in January and then do the rational, politically astute thing and disown the whole apparatus.
But Daniel Beeks isn’t writing a political advice column. He’s writing a sop piece for conservatives who can use it as another club to bash whatever Liberal or Progressive is in office. He’s writing for TV pundits who can invite him on their shows to ask him “why doesn’t President Adams just
listen" to the goons ranting about foreign devils coming to siphon off the precious bodily fluids of good, “ordinary” Astorians. President Adams cannot “bridge the gap” between the vast majority of this country and its angry conservative minority because every single bridge that has been built has been built from one direction, from left to right, and as soon as it gets close enough for conservatives to reach they’ve hurled fire at it until the cinders were floating away in the breeze along with the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects. The Democratic machine doesn’t want to engage in dialogue that crosses partisan lines, they want to make tons of money peddling blind, frothing partisanship (and plenty of other grifts) to their base.
Here is how President Adams can really be a “Uniter-in-Chief”: he can keep saying what he said on Memorial Day. He can speak the truth, openly and unashamedly, about the ugly things that motivate conservative political action in Astoria in 2020. That will unite all the Astorians who really care about this country as something more than a cash cow.