I can be a bad winner and a sore loser.

I come by it honestly. I’m an American, and Americans can be notoriously bad winners and sore losers.

It comes from winning too much. Didn’t we just take more medals in the winter Olympics than any other country? We believe that God made us winners, and if we don’t win, the Devil’s in it and we can be pretty ugly.

Once I went to visit a friend in the hospital after he suffered a bad accident. He liked to play chess, so I took a chess set along. I read him a humorous short story then played two games of chess with him. I told myself before I went that I should let him win. But did I?

No. I don’t like to lose, even to a guy who is in pain and needs something, like winning at chess, to make him feel better. So I beat him — no, I thrashed him — and I did my victory dance around the hospital room.

Democrats, bad winners, have done their victory dance after their health care win.

Now, Republicans are reminding us what a sore loser is.

They say they’re going to do everything to make life difficult for Democrats for two years. One Republican senator said he wasn’t going to work with them at all.

See, that’s a sore loser. He doesn’t care that his job affects 360 million people. He’s only out to get his and his party’s way, which is pretty much what the Democrats did to get health care reform through.

And now, for at least the next two years, we have to listen to hotheads and loudmouths on both sides debating in derogatory terms that either health care has been saved or destroyed, whether Democrats or Republicans have polarized politics more, or whether Democrats or Republicans have bankrupted America.

It’s a lot like listening to Israelis and Palestinians argue who fired the first shot or committed the first atrocity in the Middle East and why retaliation on their part is justified. It’s a lot like listening to the Irish and English argue about who started the conflict in Northern Ireland. Only we don’t go back half a millenium or three millenia as the Brits and Irish or Middle Easteners, respectively, do.

Our who-started-it-first and who’s-to-blame-more arguments only go back about 150 years.

Whenever these arguments come up we have to argue whether Franklin D. Roosevelt pulled us out of the Great Depression or turned us into a socialist state, or whether Republicans or Democrats are responsible for the wars we’ve gotten into, or whether Republicans or Democrats represent the working man more, stand for God and the Bible more, or cheat, lie, derogate and whine more.

That’s because we want to be winners, and if we don’t win, we’re sore.

I remember when the Russians put the first satellite and man in space. We had a hard time congratulating them. In fact, my dad told me the damn Ruski Gargarin had a gun with him and he was taking pot shots at Americans and other freedom-loving people as he circled the globe.

But hey, that’s who we are.

Instead of telling the truth, we’ll say about health care reform that either the Democrats want to take over one-sixth of the nation’s economy, which they have not done, or Republicans just want poor, ill Americans to die without any opportunity for health care, which I don’t believe is true either.

But hey, this isn’t about truth or what’s right. It’s about winning, and I’m all about that — if I can’t win, I’m sore.

My wife used to beat me at this memory game in which you have to figure out the color and placement order of five hidden pegs. She doesn’t beat me anymore. I won’t play her.

I’m a sore loser.



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