My Kinda Guy - Kinda

I consider John Cole (Balloon Juice) a fellow traveller - a Conservative In Recovery.  And actually, I don't think of it as recovering from being conservative so much as trying to recover what being conservative should really mean.  But that begs for an attempt to define "conservative", which only turns "conservative" into "Conservat-ism", which is always where it falls apart because nothing fucks up a good philosophy like hanging that "ism" on the end of it.  The purists jump in and start weeding out those who don't conform - all in the name of "inclusion" and "the big tent", of course - which is where I think the Repubs are stuck now.  Eventually, the only planks left in the GOP Platform are Party Loyalty and Anti-Obama.

So "conservative" is a little like deciding between art and pornography - ya get to make that call for yourself, and nobody else.

But there's one thing more to put to rest before we can claim to be fully free of this Dark Side Politics.  We have to recognize this for the utter bullshit that it is:

Republicans might be crazy, but at least they fucking fight. Whether I am right or wrong, I stand up for what I believe.

I hear this a lot when people feel the need to criticize the Dems (usually for trying to play nice with their fellow Americans - which is kinda the fucking point in a democracy BTW).

You might as well say, "George Zimmerman may have goaded Trayvon Martin into a fight so he'd have an excuse to murder the kid in cold blood, but at least he was standing up for what he believed in".

You don't get points for fighting on the wrong fucking side.