ad poopulum

It was one of those August dog days where the heat and humidity are so oppressive that you just want to sit in an air conditioned FEMA trailer and quaff frosty Sierra Nevadas all afternoon, composing long, Faulknerian sentences (for the mere reason that you find it entertaining) instead of going out in the sub-Sahara swelter of the dump, running a twenty ton yellow front-end loader spewing poisonous diesel fumes and creating a din of noise and vibration that makes your ears ring and your teeth numb.


But this is not August, you think to yourself, this is June and this is not Botswana, it is Boston; now all the nattering about global warming is gonna start up again. The good news is that even the most hold-out looney conservatives are starting to realize that the scientific evidence is against them and no amount of pretzel logic is going to sway the thinking of the best and brightest people in the world which we see melting before our eyes like an ice cube on a hot tin roof.

Clooney and I were sitting in the FEMA trailer. It was 3pm and time for what we call "high tea." Clooney was scrawling on that infernal white board that he calls his blog. We had been discussing the partisan political climate in the USA. I had observed that Conservatism seemed like a "lost cause" since the history of the world was pretty much a story of progress and change.

I noted that the majority of the most educated people in the country tended to be liberal. College professors and students, book publishers, news organizations (the "mainstream media" that conservative nutjobs are always complaining about). I wondered aloud why this was so.

Clooney haughtily declared that these poor deluded souls had been deluded by some sort of groupspeak, which apparently the conservatives are immune from by nature of their superior character and perspicuity. He had enummerated them on his whiteboard which can be found here

I thought it was a nice list of admirable characteristics, but that list did not describe many of the conservatives of my acquaintance. So, I started my own list:

A conservative

- Distrusts the motives of anyone not in the clan.
- Fears people who do not believe in absolute authority.
- Thinks Liberals are more likely to be fascists.
- Nationalistic to a fault; Abhors using the word "Global" in any context.
- Abhors dissent from party line; hates dissidents.
- Has no tolerance for ambivalence; everything is black or white.
- Believes that if God exists, he must be on their side, despite the disappointment and devastation in their lives
- Thinks that their personal accomplishments are due to superior character traits and core values and not sheer luck.
- Can attribute any problem in America today to something Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton did.
- Will demand any handout by government that the law allows, but unabashedly derides others who do the same thing.
- Believes that the liberals engage in voter fraud - because Conservatives would do it if they believed that they could get away with it. The end justifies the means.
- Evokes the small government mantra while continually voting for corrupt big government politicians
- Can easily be seduced by phonies and hypocrites by a few litmus issues.
- Thinks society would be better of more people carried automatic weapons.

- Wants your kid to enlist in the military to keep his kids safe.

- Thinks poor people are morally bankrupt and probably deserve to be poor and ignorant.
- See slippery slopes in every new invention.
- Loves the flag as a primitive symbol of tribalism.

- Claims that the opposition position is illogical but continually engages in fallacious reasoning.
- Lacks empathy.
- Claims to hold personal liberty in high esteem, does not grant this right to people who were unlucky enough to be born elsewhere in the world.
- Hates people who change their mind; sees free thinking as disloyalty.
- Uncomfortable with unscripted situations and loose canons.
- Has an arrested sense of humor; thinks puns are hilarious.