The Fallacy In Conservative Logic, As Simple As Can Be

When conservatives start in on you about what they claim they have to pay for things you use, ask them if they have toll booths at the end of their driveways to pay a per-use fare for driving on public roads. If they fly, ask them if they had to go through yet another gated entry system than the rest of us who pool our resources so that whoever needs a public service, regardless that others who also pay for it don't use it, has it available when needed.

You pay for things that they use that you don't. They never mention those things. Sit for a moment and think of all the public things that are available to us as individuals, and consider those things which you or your family don't personally use. You're paying for things that others use, that you don't. We do that because we share the burden.

But you can bet your butt that anytime one of the constipated has to pay a penny for someone else's use, they're indignant to the point of secession, sedition, and...silliness.

I'm proud to say that I pitch in for others' use, because I know that others are pitching in for mine! It's this very thing that makes us a republic - that is to say, a form of government where we refuse to allow the mob to trample the individual - instead of a mob-rule pure democracy.

How Romney views most Americans

What Romney has demonstrated is that the people of his socioeconomic group want to keep the middle and working classes poor and owing so that the wealthy will have sufficient labor to do their housework, grow their crops, fetch their drinks and food, and fill their factories and call centers with cheap labor. Failing that, they at least want to teach the rank and file their place in society with Romney and his cronies on top, and everyone else underneath them. Bain Capital was just the prelude. In a sense, it was Romney's graduate school where he learned exactly how to send American jobs overseas without remorse, chop up American companies into bits too small to handle the debt that he and his cronies saddled them with, and then leave the plebes in the lurch while his investors made millions. 

Know your place, peons! You're here for this reason only: To vote Mitt Romney President, then go home, shut your mouth, do your minimum wage job, and repeat the process in 4 years. Minus the job, of course.

Conservative policy failures and the failure of the two-party system

It has been the agenda of the GOP since Ronald Reagan's administration to broaden the gap between the rich and poor. This serves the purpose of preventing more people from achieving ultra-wealthy status and separates the Haves from the untouchables, the Have Nots. Be objective. Look for yourself. Read everything whether you agree with it or not, and do so with an open mind. I come from a long line of fiscal conservatives, many of whom have since left the Republican party, as I have. Members of our family were in Henry Hudson's expeditionary party, fought in every war from the Revolutionary war on. We have always been conservatives, but for the last 30 years, and even then it has been a slow exodus from the GOP. But you can't call yourself a fiscal conservative and simultaneously believe that the policies of Reagan, Bush 41, & Bush 43, as well as those of the Do Nothing 112th Congress are conservative. They're not. They have created a welfare state, but not one which helps those in need. They've created a welfare state which has served the ultra-wealthy. Trickle-down economics is a myth, such as it's portrayed. Twenty years worth of conservative administrations hasn't created the jobs they boast. It's all been a lie. As for the Democrats, they're not significantly better, either. It's time to abolish the two-party system and urge other parties into the mix. We also need to enact legislation which will force candidates to accept public campaign funding to remove money from the equation, and we need to ban lobbying completely. When wealthy concerns alone have the ears of lawmakers, individual rights get trampled.

Response and agreement with a friend's Facebook post

You're right. Arch-conservatives have long had the goal of privatizing every part of government they could so that they could profit from it. They duped social conservatives like evangelical, fundamentalist, and extremist christians into voting for them with the God-Gays-Guns scheme and it worked. It was a propaganda program that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of, and it's still working for them today. You have to hand it to them, they did their demographic and psychological research. You can pretty easily divide humanity into 2 groups, when thought about in this way, Thinkers and Believers. Believers are the type who want to...believe...in things rather than do the skeptical work of research, no matter how simple that might be. Thinkers are skeptics, not accepting everything at face value until they've had a chance to research it. So, the arch-conservatives went after the Believers - christians. They made it SEEM like they were pro-god, pro-gun, and anti-gay. In reality, they couldn't have given two shits about god, guns or gays, they just wanted a voting bloc who could elect their proxies to office in order to establish the conservative agenda. Again, you've gotta hand it to them, it worked...beyond their imaginings, at that. Now they can sit back, throw a handful of money at this or that campaign and have their work done for them by people who actually believe that they're better off with a privatized government. But when ALL roads become toll roads, when ALL schools are for-profit, when ALL medicine is pay-upon-receipt-of-services, when credit is denied to everyone (the wealthy don't need credit), and EVERYTHING you do requires payment at the time you need it...it will be too late to do anything about it because the police will be on the side of the wealthy...for that matter, they already are. Just take a look at what's happening with Occupy Wall Street at this very moment. Arch-conservatives want no middle class. They want but 2 classes: Theirs, and the workers who do their bidding.

Why we fail to understand conservatives

I think the reason that so many of us have trouble understanding the actions of Republicans, Tea Partiers, and other sundry conservative politicians is that they treat political office like a business, whereas we see it as a post from which one might contribute to the general weal. They see it as a profit center. We see it as a public service. They see it as a sinecure. We see it as a temporary position.

These are fundamental differences that can't be easily rectified. Republican politicians often come from the private sector with the intent of bending the power of their political office to their own will, and for personal profit. Few of us on the left have been able to sort through the warp and weft of their political fabric to unravel what was really right on the surface all along: The truth that they came to politics because they view government as inefficient and even immoral and then set about operating government as inefficiently and immorally as possible in order to bring those ends about, making them self-fulfilling prophecies.

It seems to me that when people put on blinders which limit their sight lines to only those ideas which they wish to see, it becomes not merely impossible, but sincerely impossible (pardon the WoO pun) to get them to see anything else, regardless how imposing, how credible, or how popular it might be.

I will support the President so long as he follows this simple concept: Do that which you set about to do, that which we elected you to do, not bending to the political will of your opponents, and never, EVER losing sight of the fact that we elected YOU to make CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.

Conservative vitriol, liberal retrenchment, and historical revisionism

I don’t know that I should be surprised, but as far out of bounds as the political discourse had already been prior to the 2010 mid-term election cycle, it has recently moved the needle completely off the gauge. There are 3 main problems that affect the ability of people who differ in their political views to communicate in a manner befitting people who share one nationality. The first is the elevated vitriol coming from the right. While it’s not that unusual to find more anger coming from people who “feel” their beliefs rather than from those who actively research the facts and think, the accelerated pitch of the right’s vitriol has shut down any sort of amicable, constructive conversation. That anger isn’t directed merely at politicians of the opposite stripe, it’s being directed at anyone who doesn’t jump up and down screaming and shouting and wildly waving the American flag to the tunes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. I was recently shouted at by a woman who appeared to be in her 40s and called me a coward and traitor because I said that I was glad that combat operations in Iraq had ended. I pulled out my Veteran’s ID card and quietly pointed to the “Service Connected” identifier showing that my disabilities were incurred as a result of my service to my country. Her husband seemed pained and wouldn’t look at me as he pulled her away, but it was clear that he understood. When she rolled the window down in their pickup, I simply asked her “Ma’am, what branch did you serve in?”. I’m not sure what her response was after the initial glass-shatteringly-screeched “That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it”, but I do know that spittle was flying and her husband was holding onto her to keep her from getting out as he backed out of the parking spot and quickly left the parking lot.


She called me a coward and a traitor.  And that’s the thing; she had no idea who I am, not that I’m anyone special. She just knew that I had a different opinion and that sent her into a towering tirade. Why? Because the sheep have been flocked by the conservative-controlled media shepherds. The right seems lost in a maze of national scale, unable to do the simple math of subtraction that points an accusing, sharpened pencil at conservative policies that created the conditions for the Perfect Storm that lead directly to the Great Recession. When asked by others when the Great Recession began, I tell them that it began the day Ronald Reagan took office, and there’s truth in that that conservatives don’t want to see because they’ve elevated him to godlike status and any admission that the Great Communicator’s fiscal policies were anything but flawless causes the firmament to shake and the sky to darken in their eyes. But it’s true. They’re loathe to admit, if you can find one educated well enough to be able to do the research, that the greatest tax increase in American history – still to this day – was enacted by Ronald Reagan the year following his massive tax cuts. Why? Because even the Gipper could see that it was impossible to balance the budget when there was no revenue stream. But, when many of those tax cuts were repealed, a good deal of others were not. And it was those that were not that is the rub because 1981′s massive tax cuts remained in effect for the wealthy when in 1982 the middle class had their taxes raised not just back to the pre-1981 level, but even higher.   And that’s a fact.


These annoying facts are the inconvenient truth that gives the political right nightmares. But rather than deal with them, or even admit them, they have bent space and time to reinvent the truth and hammer it night and day with the bludgeon of conservative commentators to subtly, slowly, but certainly reshape it to their desires. The conservative political laity drink the wine and eat the flesh and the truth has been transmuted. The now-warped history as told by Beck, Palin, Rove, Gingrich, Limbaugh, et alia, has been swept clean of any right-wing wrongdoing, and in fact now points the fickle finger of fate at liberals, divesting the GOP of blame and casting it onto their enemies.


All of that would be bad enough of itself, but liberals have let them do it. Liberals have allowed conservatives to rewrite history and to relegate the very word liberal to the opprobrium normally reserved for felons. Liberal lawmakers – barring a few like Representative Barney Frank who himself has faced down the name-callers and political backstabbers – shrink from the appellation ‘liberal’. Some, like the cowardly Jim Marshall, D-GA, try to distance themselves from Speaker Pelosi and President Obama in their mid-term TV ads going so far as to boast that they’ve voted with the Republicans more than with their own party. It’s disgraceful, the craven behavior of these political quislings who just 2 years ago were riding so high on a wave of political capital generated by the goodwill forged by Madame Speaker and Mister President themselves. Capital that they then squandered with infighting and intra-party bickering.


Liberals have turned out to be less fitting of the title of citizen than in a long while. It used to be a liberal notion that once the ball was rolling they would keep it rolling and roll right over opposition to programs which benefit those of lesser means and let the success of those programs show over time that they were indeed the right things to do, e.g. PWA, CCC, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. FDR’s massive public works programs are a great example of what liberalism has done for our society. The biggest expenditure by our government at any time for any project not related to war resulted in a stronger economy, vastly improved and extended infrastructure, and jobs for people when they needed them. It was a double bonus that the jobs many of the jobless got through those programs resulted in the magnificent, enduring structures in our national parks, built for pennies on the dollar and returning  an abiding profit from their initial investment in the forms of recreation, leisure, and appreciation of the grandeur of our parklands.


The times have changed, and now even a liberal president with the backing of both chambers of our national assembly helmed by those of his own party can’t get his own party’s programs enacted. FDR, JFK and LBJ would all be embarrassed to learn that he belongs to the same party that they lead to lift the country out of the Great Depression, to build a space program and journey us to the moon, and to establish the Great Society in order to help those who were mired in poverty.


So here we are. The Republicans will surely sweep to victory next month, and I can’t say that the Democrats deserve anything less than losing. A political xenophobia has set in, preventing people of either major party from even attempting to understand the points the other side tries to make or from having civil discourse about them. Both sides have painted themselves into opposing corners and like a couple of dogs who can’t quite reach each other, they bark endlessly, tiringly, annoyingly, and have forgotten why the first bark was barked anyway. While we’re on dogs, I just have to think that the poor scraggly starved and scarred puppy who came to our door a month ago begging for food after having either escaped a cruel master or possibly being thrown out has more sense than these politicians do; even a dog won’t shit in his own house.