Really Squinney? I would find a less hyperbolic take if I were you.
Quote:There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.
Perhaps Roberts is spending a lot of time in redneck bars taking the pulse of the red states, but I doubt it.
Quote:America has blundered into a needless and dangerous war, and fully half of the country's population is enthusiastic.
Needless? I can imagine a world much worse off without the Iraq invasion. Saddam at full power, fulfilling his bent for the best weapons, realigning himself with stateless terrorists (which alliances have never been disproven btw, and still seem eminently logical), the no fly zones extinct (they were an invention of the US and UK imperialists after all, not the UN), and the Iraqis broke and subjugated as before by their dictator and his sons. But never mind the inevitable argument about all that. How does he figure that supporters of the war are "enthusiastic"? His descriptions belie his lack of objectivety, and for all his conservative credentials, his failure to find a liberal media is the result of his being a rather small tree in that forest.
Listen, it isn't easy being a conservative. It was a lot more fun sitting with my friends drinking chai tea and bemoaning the follies of Republicans and stupidity of most Americans for electing them while marveling at how easy it would be to make everything right. The pentagon holding bake sales, right? But growing (much) older has changed the way I see some things. Those old familiar Democrats on whom I depended to wax victorious are not merely losers, they are also of questionable intellegence, seemingly content to bash without point (Carter and Kennedy for example). Their allies are amazingly suspect: the NEA, my union for years which has never missed a chance to increase the cost of public education for little educational advantage, Michael Moore, who, blessed by the first amendment, has become rich by creating his own genre which, devoid of those expensive actors, always proves its predisposed point at the expense of truth, and assorted egoists from Hollywood to Broadway who assuage their guilt by throwing a slice of the entertainment pie the left's way and, to their detriment, spouting whenever a microphone comes their way. Add the trial lawyers, France, old burned out hippies, Eminem, the ACLU, and the left doesn't have much to offer but what Roosevelt did: hope for a better tomorrow through profligate government spending.
Now, it is true that both sides spend like sailors on leave, that corporations run the show and have no morality, that some conservatives are religious wackos, and that government policy CAN be used for good, preferably by people who understand that the law of unintended consequence is Rule Numero UNO. My choice of ideology results from the feeling that the left is and will always be bipolar. On the one hand the patron of all the downtrodden, all the while representing self serving individuals and organizations that make the robber barons seem charitable. On another hand promising "a stronger America" while parading appeasers and parsers as its spokesmen, and nominating someone who was a hero just before he was a traitor. You sort of get what you see with Republicans. Quixotic puppeted Yalie Texans that love big business and will fight wars when necessary, but maybe not well. Oh well, life is a compromise.
