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September 16, 2007
Fightin' Conservatives
I think today's Prickly City is interesting more for what it doesn't show than what's actually there, and it ties in nicely with what Salon writer Glenn Greenwald talked about in his post yesterday. In PC Carmen is "fighting" with herself, daydreaming that she's a warrior, fighting herself as a sumo wrestler, a boxer, and I'm guessing a samurai (yeah, that one doesn't make much sense - I wonder if he started drawing Carmen fencing herself but since she'd be wearing that weird silver face mask we couldn't tell it was her). This internal struggle, of course, is trying to figure out what it means to be a conservative today.
What's interesting to me is that she summed up the current conservative leadership pretty well by showing the one thing so many of them refuse to do: actually fight in our military as a member of the armed forces as real warriors. These tough guys are so anxious to fight they're more than happy to send other kids off to battle in wars based on lies, but don't you dare ask them to go themselves or send some of their own loved ones. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner referred to the deaths of our troops in Iraq as a "small price." Bill O'Reilly is more than happy to send off another thousand troops to die in Iraq - just don't ask him or his family to volunteer. Of course they're joined by the various neo-conservative warhawks like the Kagan family and Bill Kristol, who have been wrong about everything when it comes to these wars yet are now pushing to invade Iran. Needless to say none of them have sacrificed anything when it comes to being true warriors and actually fighting themselves.
I understand it must be difficult claiming to be a conservative these days. Guys like Stantis were more than happy to support Bush in 2000 and 2004. What's the difference now that it's 2007? Well, all of the conservative policies Bush and the conservative Republicans put in place and they loudly endorsed have proven to be catastrophic failures. Nothing's changed in their actual belief systems - it's just been proven that their form of governing doesn't work, and they can't accept that. "It must be the Democrats' fault!" "Let's blame it on the terrorists!" "George W. Bush isn't a REAL conservative!" And on and on it goes.
That internal struggle of yours, Carmen/Stantis? Has nothing to do with being a conservative. It has everything to do with you coming to terms with the fact that the politics you believe in are a complete and utter failure. You had your chance. Six years of unchecked power. And you've given us two wars without end, a recession, and a world that hates us all while the rich get rich and the rest of us suffer with medical bills and a crumbling infrastructure. And you failed. You shouldn't be fighting with your conscience.
You should just be apologizing to the rest of us.
