Critique of Tierney's New Op-Ed

I realize that I am a day late commenting on Tierney's Op-Ed, but I was frantically trying to finish a homework assignment yesterday so it wasn't more than two days late!

Tierney's Op-Ed entitled, "What Democrats Can Learn From Howard Stern", suggests that Democrats should try to explore alternate means of achieving their goals just as Howard Stern pursued alternate means of broadcasting his show despite censorship from the FCC. The alternate means that Democrats should pursue, according to Tierney, are to look for solutions other than big government to solve issues such as education. Overall, I thought his analogy was very loosely constructed and poorly written. He simply used the Howard Stern-Democrats analogy so he could associate Democrats with something ridiculous and "out there", which is just a cheap shot. He could have used any other example of someone who overcame a barrier by pursuing alternate means of achieving their goal.

So yeah, overall I thought it his Op-Ed was just plain bad, but there were other things mentioned in the article that bothered me. For one thing he keeps referring to the fact that Democrats and liberals love big government and bureaucracy, thereby also implying that Republicans and conservatives are for small government. While this certainly was the case 20-30 years ago, I'm not so sure that this is still the case. In case Tierney hasn't noticed, our political climate is changing. George W. Bush and others in the administration are referred to as Republicans and/or conservatives, but I wouldn't say they are necessarily for small government. In fact, their policy can be defined very simply -- they are simply against things that threaten their power (my entries about the Supreme Court Nominations and the Rove/Libby mess are related to this). Hence the need for the Patriot Act, the right to torture and detain prisoners for any length, judges to defer to the president's every whim, aides who act maliciously towards those who speak against the government, etc. While the currrent administration doesn't necessarily want large government, its desire for an all powerful executive branch contradicts the notion of small government.