Random Wednesday One Day Late

I'm trying to do this quickly, before Kanye West arrives...

I love my life. My classes are great, my wife is amazing, my kids are stupendous.

Having said that, my ankle and shoulder hurt.

I miss Mary Travers and Patrick Swayze and Larry Gelbart.

Tony Kornheiser has the best radio show in the country. If you are in DC, it's ESPN 980. Everywhere else, it's podcasted. Listen, laugh, and enjoy. (It's on ESPN for some reason, but it's mostly not sports, so don't let that scare you off.)

It switched over to autumn a couple of days ago here in the mountains. It's a nice change, but sorta strange.

If anyone has good ideas for what kind of superhero I should be for a pep assembly next week, I am all ears.

The D-backs just stink. And I'm sad about it.

Kettle corn is the best food on earth. It makes me sad that the county fair is over. The idea of chocolate covered bacon, doesn't.

Thanks for reading. I'll try to do better next time.

An oldie and a goodie

I've been gone for awhile, but I wanted to jump back into the fray. I'll be trying to do more frequent updates, but I looked back over my writing and found the best political thing I've written. It still counts as my mission statement of sorts. I don't want to be offensive to anyone, but I truly believe all of this and I can't understand the point of view that opposes this. Anyway, enjoy, I hope...

I have stayed out of the political debate for too long. As I looked at American culture and the political landscape, I saw bad things, but I largely held my tongue. I supported candidates I believed in, but I left it at that. Now that we are coming to the critical point in the election cycle, I see how close we are to getting the bad people (conservatives) out of office. I can’t stand on the sidelines anymore.

Let me be clear. The conservative movement has been bad, and only bad, for the United States going back decades. The conservatives brought us religious intolerance, states’ rights, and slavery in the 1800’s. They initiated a civil war in the 1860’s which threatened to destroy the country. Conservatives gave the country a morally bankrupt Jim Crow social structure starting in the 1870’s and lasting until the 1960’s in much of the country.

Conservatives consistently give unwarranted power to big businesses, the other great evil in our country. From the corruption of the 1920’s, which led to the Great Depression to the financially and militarily immoral Reagan administration, which gave rise to the “me-first-and-screw-everyone-else” policies of the 1980’s, conservatives have torn at the basic goodness of the American people. And this is to say nothing of the current administration. It is the ultimate irony that the bad people of American politics (conservatives) want to be known as the champions of personal freedom, yet they want to control the most intimate details of our personal lives. The “freedom” they tout is the freedom to give more money to big corporations at the expense of regular Americans.

In that same time frame, I can point to no large-scale benefit brought to the country by conservatives. Of course the Standard Oil Trusts and Enrons loved them, but regular people got nothing. The overwhelming majority of Americans suffer at the hands of politically evil conservatives. While I hold a single viewpoint claimed by the conservatives (I am pro-life), I could no sooner support a conservative and the rest of their corrupt ideas than I could support a child molester who had once given a few dollars to charity. Taken as a whole, the conservative movement has damaged my workplace, my church, my planet, and my country, all of which I find unforgivable.

The conservatives have only managed to maintain control by demonizing those who oppose them. Well-meaning Americans who didn’t know better supported conservatives as an alternative to what they had been told were “evil liberals.” Now, however, there can be no doubt as to the true evil in American politics: conservatives. The left has recently shunned the term “liberal” because those on the right have made it into a pejorative. “Liberal” should no longer be a bad word. All the good that has ever been done in this country has been done by liberals. No thinking person with an ounce of decency or concern for humanity could vote for a conservative. It is time to call a spade a spade and clearly label the conservative movement as bad for America.

A person who identifies himself or herself as a conservative is allied with all the evil our country can produce. I can respect a Republican, and I do; Republicans are not the problem. I cannot respect a person who calls himself or herself a conservative with a full understanding of all that the word implies. “Conservative” is a title of disgrace and we need to treat it as such. We need to treat those who claim the title of “conservative” as we would those who claim the related titles of “thief,” “robber,” and “criminal.” “Conservative” is a bad word.