“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” is a well-known tune from the Golden Age of Broadway. A Friday Salon article made it sound as if a song about how today’s conservatives feel could be called “Besieged, Badgered and Beleaguered.”
In a piece pegged to Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump, Andrew O’Hehir opined that the right “has become exactly what it has long accused the left of being, not entirely without justification: a bunch of whiners and perennial victims who never shut up about how much they have suffered at the hands of evil but nebulous enemies.”
For conservatives, O’Hehir went on, “this represents a dramatic turnabout from the era of Reagan’s ascension, which was built on invariably sunny and upbeat political rhetoric…Well, it ain’t morning in America anymore, folks. It’s the dark night of the soul; it’s fear and trembling and sickness unto death. Those GOP candidates who began the 2016 campaign with some semblance of an optimistic message…have gotten swamped beneath the unrelenting meanness and hostility of Trump and Ted Cruz.”
O’Hehir closed by trying to put himself in a typical right-winger’s shoes (bolding added):
Many people in our country responded to a promise of permanent prosperity in a great land that was loved and envied around the world. Instead, things kept getting worse and their fellow citizens inexplicably elected a Muslim usurper not once but twice, and the only part of the promise that was kept was the cheap 30-pack at the mini-mart and the wings at TGI Fridays. The squirmish with the American Id has been lost; all that’s left is the politics of feeling bad, the nearness of death, the promise that #NoLivesMatter.
