When I post a diary at KOS, it's usually directed at a fellow Kossack audience, in the form of an action alert or update about a candidate or race that's flying under the Kossack consciousness and merits increased attention (such as the
Georgia Democratic lieutenant governor candidates, the primaries for whom are coming up in just a few weeks. Rarely do I post a missive directed specifically at conservatives, unless it's in the form of an LTE expressing my disgust or outrage over some sort of Issue of the Week. But not today.
I've recently come to a conclusion about why 30 percent (give or take a few points) of all Americans still persist on supporting the Bush/Neocon/conservative agenda in all its iterations. If you aren't one of the 30 percent, join me at the flip for my take on the matter. If you are, come inside and learn a little about yourselves, from one on the outside of the Free Republic.
To all conservative hangers-on: following is one liberal's opinion about why you (STILL) support the Bush Administration and the right-wing agenda in general. It is simply my own observation based on the consistent patterns of such hangers-on not just in the media or Congress, but in right-wingers I see on a day-to-day basis both at work and in my neighborhood, and even within my own family. I write this with a lot of love and pain, but not without a healthy dose of what I think is justified anger as well.
I knew you in grammar school, middle school, high school, and college. You were the ones who had a great deal of good fortunes handed to you--whether it was your good looks, your popularity, or your penchant for getting away with pulling mischief for which other kids got punished. Maybe you were elected Class President or Homecoming Queen, and later scratched your head and wondered why; after all, your grades were mediocre and that big permed hair in the `80s looked really tacky, come to think of it.
Perhaps you reveled in the bullying and the vilifying of the nerdy kids, the outcasts, the fat boy or the ugly girl--whether for pure Schädenfreude or for fear that, if you didn't join in on the bullying, the other kids would think you were one of "them." Maybe you felt sorry for these rejects in a way. You might have identified with their feelings of being lost, abandoned, alone, with nowhere to go; but you never, ever dared sharing these feelings with them or even your own friends, for fear of--again--being perceived by your peers as being one of "those losers."
In college--if you went--you were probably in a sorority or a fraternity (like your idol George W. Bush himself). If not, maybe you hung out in Young Life because at high schools like that in Littleton, Colorado; or in colleges like Texas A&M University, being a born-again Christian was the in-thing. If you weren't into all of that religious stuff, or if you were enlightened (via Ecstasy and acid and powdered cocaine you "experimented" with) to the notion that the Greek system was pretty shallow anyway, you might have just partied a lot, gone to a lot of football games, and felt really evolved and in touch with humanity and all that by going to all those Widespread Panic, Pearl Jam, and Ben Harper concerts.
After graduation, you got a job and began business as usual. If you came into adulthood in the Nineties (like I did), you were amazed to see that the nerdy kids you'd beat up in high school had gotten six-digit salaries and cushy benefits at companies like Real Networks, Microsoft, Adobe, or Macromedia through hard work, intelligence, and innovation (qualities that were rewarded, as it turns out, during the Clinton Administration, but either outcast or dismissed under Clinton's successors).
Maybe your life was good under Clinton and you just didn't bother to pay attention to boring things like politics and world issues; after all, it was much more fun to keep on top of what happened to Amy Fisher, the Menendez brothers, the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan feud, and who could forget O.J. in the white Bronco?
Or, maybe your life was STILL good under Clinton, but you griped with your friends about what a bitch his wife was, or how he could even THINK of suggesting the Pentagon turn a blind eye to gays in the military with the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" proposition. Even though you might have never served in the military and didn't intend to do so, it simply grossed you out to think about one of those perverts eyeing you when you were naked in the military barracks showers you never entered.
Radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity seemed to know how you felt. They identified with your bewilderment and frustration that "they" were becoming empowered: the feminists, the GLBT community, the minorities, the nerdy geeks you made fun of in school who grew up to make something of themselves in Clinton's booming economy that really did offer opportunity for all. And you hated this, because you didn't want "them" to share your self-made pedestal.
When Y2K came around, that blow-job-loving pervert was out and you had a chance to either vote in his successor, Al Gore; or some governor from Texas called George W. Bush, about whom you'd heard a bit but felt you could at least have a beer with or trust to pick up your children from daycare. Things got a little dicey with that whole Florida pregnant-chad fiasco, but your guy eventually won out. GW was nothing special, you thought, but an America under a President Gore would be unfathomable to bear. Who wanted a President who would preach on and on about stuff that didn't relate to your own life and how it could be more comfortable; but instead, would be about global warming and ministering to the poor, and hey, at least his daughters were pretty hot.
And then came 9/11. Finally, the lynchpin you and all conservatives like you had been waiting for. (And, unbeknownst to you, the fellows at PNAC were waiting for their "Pearl Harbor" moment as well.) All those liberals who were bitching about what an incompetent Religious Right boob Dubya was would have to shut up now. Because if they kept blathering on about social injustice and all that other irrelevant shit, it would be unpatriotic--treasonous, even--to criticize our President. Simply by being the 9/11 President, George W. Bush legitimized your conservatism--even when it was becoming harder and harder to legitimize each passing week, month, and year.
No matter that there were whispers about negligent intelligence that could have at least partially resulted in facilitating the environment for 9/11. Never mind that it seemed a little strange that our country was invading another country that had nothing to do with 9/11--weren't the bad guys in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia? And what about that overweight schlub, Michael Moore, who supposedly mentioned something about the President sitting on his ass for seven minutes after he learned that the country was under attack? Who gave a shit? That liberal pansy's movie was all lies, anyway--Rush and Hannity even said so. From these paragons of conservative talk radio virtue, you learned that liberals hated America, and you really believed this lie. The mirror they held up for us to see ourselves as a nation was just too ugly at times, and was simply not for your conservative sensibilities.
Then in 2004, John Kerry (and some other liberals whose names you couldn't remember) challenged your favorite President for his coveted second term, and you hated what Kerry had to say. You couldn't put your finger on exactly what, but the talking heads on FOX Radio told you what to think: that he was unpatriotic, that he hated America, that he was soft on terrorists, that he loved the gays and the darkies and all of those homeless, jobless assholes who loved to suck on your tax dollars, so you could afford only a Lexus and a McMansion when you really wanted a Lamborghini and a real mansion, one of those palatial kinds with granite countertops and gleaming marble floors.
Perhaps you voted for Bush in 2004 because you didn't "feel comfortable" about John Kerry, that he addressed inconvenient truths about America and Americans that made that mirror you looked in too hard to bear. Maybe you voted for Bush because you wanted to feel that false sense of "patriotism" that produces the high of the winning team at a football game, a baseball game, a hockey game; or the winning beauty or jock at the high-school Homecoming. Maybe you voted for Bush because you couldn't stand the thought of a return to the Clinton Nineties, where almost everyone had a piece of the pie, and everyone in America had a fair chance. Damn them--you had to vote for Bush because you couldn't stand the thought of "them" sharing your America with you--again.
Those "America-haters" (who are, in reality, anything BUT America-haters) who called our leaders on the carpet to hold them to account for Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, Rathergate, Coingate, and Plamegate; and, most damningly, the deadly war in Iraq that was predicated on a pack of lies so that rich men could get richer on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded. We hold up that mirror, and you don't like looking into it.
In short, many of you conservatives still support the Republicans because you are so pitifully insecure about yourselves as people that you feel you need a scapegoat on whom to project your insecurity. You need to feel as if you are better than X group of people--whether X group comprises the gays, the lesbians, the feminists, the black people, the brown people, the non-Christians, the Christian Left, the immigrants, the liberals, or just the group of high-school rejects that you loved to ridicule and belittle when you were in high school and younger.
You, not we, are the ones who need to judge yourselves honestly on how much you really love this country, and love democracy in general. In my not-so-humble opinion, you need to look in the mirror and examine the crevasses in your souls, and in your unfathomably empty conscience.
