What kind words can possibly be directed at those who think the best way to conduct a disastrous, horrific, unquestionably lost war is to perpetuate it indefinitely, thereby making bloody matters infinitely worse?
What pleasantries might we exchange with individuals who deny the deleterious effect of their gas-guzzling SUVs, or coal-fired plants and factories, even as the earth palpably warms and resulting, unprecedented storms blow up their fool asses?
It’s difficult having nice thoughts about conservatives.
After all, their “philosophy” (which is nothing more than rampant avarice at wild odds with public welfare and the common good) is utterly incapable of meeting humanity’s urgent needs, in any area of imperative consideration.
As a teenager, after the iron mines closed in my hometown and Dad lost his job, I helped put food on our family table by caddying at a country club frequented almost exclusively by right-wing Republicans.
Feeling they could speak freely before a mere bag-toter — as if I didn’t exist, or matter — they revealed the most blatant transgressions against the “values” their Party, then as now, piously professes to champion.
They fully exposed themselves as bigots, womanizers, labor exploiters, tax cheats, frauds, crooks, etc.
I washed their golf balls and handed them their clubs, all the while listening to a litany of absolute un-Godliness actually bragged about by men who control our country, and its citizens’ fates.
At the top level, they’re entirely evil, lucre-lusting con artists who’ll do anything to attain/retain riches and political office. America’s conservative rank-and-file, meanwhile, are probably the worst dupes the world has ever seen.
Together they’re responsible for myriad sins nearly beyond comprehension.
It was conservatism that trussed Matthew Shepard to a Wyoming fence, freezing and bleeding, leaving him to fearfully die alone. All because, in what passes for conservatives’ hearts and minds, having involuntary attraction for one’s own gender is a punishable “abomination,” and because “with liberty and justice for all” supposedly applies only to heterosexuals.
It’s conservatism that bombs abortion clinics, rather than acknowledge that women made unwillingly pregnant by frequently Republican males have a definite, always superseding, and decidedly moral right to determine their own reproductive destiny, as well as assure their vital, personal health.
It’s conservatism that responded to 9/11 by brutally attacking the wrong country (with a crass oil expedient as the unstated rationale), utilizing Shock and Awe to incinerate, not “liberate,” untold numbers of completely innocent Iraqi civilians.
Conservatism is why America is the only industrialized country on Earth without national healthcare. The next time you see a coffee can and a hand-lettered sign at your supermarket checkout pleading for donations for some hopeless individual with serious illness but no medical insurance, thank conservatives for that awful cruelty.
A living wage? Forget about it. The political Right incessantly thwarts giving average U.S. working stiffs base pay above the government’s own federal poverty level. Benefits or pensions? Nope. Those are only for golden-parachuting Big Business/High Finance CEOs.
And what about conservative tax policy?
Lawyers and lobbyists assure that wealthy individuals and profitable corporations enjoy tax loopholes large enough to accommodate a convoy of eighteen-wheelers. Meanwhile, Joe Sixpack has such scant chance for payment deferment that he couldn’t squeeze a Kia Rio through his “loophole” without scratching all hell out of its paint job!
And then there’s conservatism’s “fundamentalist” religion, with its prejudice and smug supremacy sanctimoniously dumped upon precisely the poor, ostracized outcasts that Jesus of Nazareth made a pivotal point of not condemning and always placing first.
Let’s not forget Wall Street.
Conservative traders would be happy as clams if the sub-prime mortgage scam they cooked up hadn’t blown up in their faces. But now that it has, their worry revolves exclusively around resulting stock market “volatility” and “fluctuations” that impact their own earnings. They shed no tears for the multitudes of ordinary, ripped-off Americans who’ll lose their homes because of institutionalized usury fraud.
Conservatism is why “double standard” ought to be semantically amended to either triple or quadruple standard to emphasize the massive hypocrisy that the political/religious Right routinely displays.
No, I can’t find it within myself to say anything good about conservatism.
It’d be easier to laud the attributes of ticks, leeches, and sea lampreys, all of which have a substantially less harmful impact on their hosts.
Conservatism is a shamefully self-serving attempt at holding back change and progress by those who’ve used their dominant moment in time to gain exploitatively derived wealth and power, and who then face the justifiable wrath of their victims.
It’s an ongoing effort by human parasites to perpetuate the blood sucking that grossly inequitable relations between the owning class and the rest of us first gave rise to in the bad old days.
It’s piracy, without wooden ships and cannons, transferred to the modern age. It’s the Robber Barons deja vu.
I have far better things to applaud, and stand up for.
As have all Americans possessing even a modicum of true patriotism and simple decency.