Thursday, February 12, 2009

Dead Party Walking

While driving home to have some lunch, I tuned into our local conservative talk radio station (which would be a good substitute for a pair of paddles hooked up to a car battery in case my heart ever stopped) and listened for a couple of minutes to Glenn Beck, lately of CNN, now of Fox and his own radio show every day.

Now Beck seems to be a fairly nice guy, though the former DJ/drug abuser and/or alcoholic/Mormon convert's politics and logic escape me. He was going on and on about how the Big Elephants are going to "stay the course" against the Democratic masses over the next 12-24 months and then have to "clean up their own act and throw out the bums" from the party who apparently caused their recent troubles (I guess he's talking about the big spenders and "moderates" who snuggled up to the Dems too closely over the years, though he COULD have been talking about the crooks, the corrupt ones or the out-and-out racists who seem to still populate their ranks here and there). Then he had to go and start ranting about how if only the Republican party would get "back" to it's "conservative principles" and elect ONLY those to office who will stick with that version of their ideological purity, that they'll finally convince the vast majority of Americans to vote their way next time and bring about a new version of the old America, originally envisioned by those God-fearing Framers of the Constitution.

Which, of course, is a bunch of hogwash. The Framers could barely stand each other as it was, but at least they knew how to compromise and make deals, which is what got us the Constitution that we have, which was their real genius, NOT the made up, so-called "Christian" America that Beck, Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh and the other neo-con radio show jocks seem to think they created. It's strange to me that the Big Elephants keep thinking that if they'll only purge their ranks of the less-than-pure ideologically, they'll win all the elections; it's rather like the old Communist version of the New Man. Once all the old capitalistic urges were purged out, the New Man would be a Communist like Karl Marx envisioned--pure of heart, willing to share his all with his comrades on the commune, not having any impure motives or thoughts.

But human nature, being what it is, keeps getting in the way. Being responsible, self-reliant and paying your own way would be nice, but it isn't the way things have ever worked in this country. We'll always have those who cannot do for themselves, many times through no fault of their own, and we'll always have the venal and cruel, who are out only for themselves, who need to have someone riding heard on them to keep them bottled up so they won't hurt the society as a whole. Beck and the neo-con's faulty logic is that they can create the New Conservative Man and take over everything, when their own lives and greed show clearly that they'll never do it.

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