The koan of silence

I didn’t expect that conservatives would cooperate with the Obama administration, and so I am not surprised or disappointed that they do not. If the US is divided into liberal and conservative schools of thought, and both sides want to have their way, and will go to some lengths to get it, then what I wonder is, are the lengths important?

All during BushCo, conservatives kept telling us that lengths were terribly important, and that even criticizing the president’s policies was tantamount to treason. To say such a thing now sounds like hyperbole, but of course it wasn’t. Democrats were frequently accused of wanting the terrorists to “win,” of wanting the US to fail in Iraq, or to fail in the “war on terror,” whatever the fuck that is.

Now it's okay to hope for the failure of the president, as evidenced during the recent CPAC convention. Media commentators keep telling us that CPAC does not represent most conservatives, that it is a hard-core right wing organization. And indeed, plenty of its sponsors are fringe lunatic groups like the Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America, but they were also sponsored by AT&T and Google.

In the case of AT&T, it might’ve been payback. AT&T has mostly conservatives (but also many Democrats, including our current president) to thank for saving it from thousands of lawsuits brought by Americans whose privacy was invaded by illegal government wiretapping carried out secretly with the illegal aid of AT&T. Not that the lawsuits would’ve resulted in anything but thousands of cases thrown out of court due to failure to demonstrate damages, but still.

Google is a bit tougher to fathom. Perhaps they have decided to change their motto from “Don’t be evil,” to “Don’t be afraid to sponsor evil.”

But I’m not really going to talk about CPAC, because of the whole wrestling with a pig thing. Robert Bolton got some laughs when he suggested that Obama might take the threat from Iran more seriously if the US city that they decided to take out was Chicago. And it’s okay if you make jokes about people in Chicago dying, because they are only liberals. Coulter already proved this conservative theorem when she joked about how she wished it was the headquarters of the New York Times that Timothy McVeigh had bombed, and Ari Fleisher did not subsequently tell her to “watch what you say.” Yeah, Obama has really put Chicago on the liberal map. Not only is the city not part of that “real” America that Sarah Palin was always flappin her jaw about, but they might be the new Massachusetts.

Also in his speech, Bolton admitted that BushCo made some mistakes. Anyone want to guess what the biggest one was?

Not invading Iran.

Yeah, he was our ambassador to the U.N.

Okay, I guess I got a few more things to say about CPAC after all, and it’s not about that little twerp who wowed the convention with a 2 minute speech about how “conservative” means, you know, “conservative,” because I don’t like making fun of kids who don’t realize that as a Republican, they have taken an already dicey probability of sexual gratification before the age of 30 and sent their chances plummeting by displaying a public hard-on for the party of no sex, no drugs, and no rock-n-roll.

It’s like that kid with the anti-swearing campaign. I wonder, did his parents explain to him that he is, at some point, going to want to touch naughty bits with a person of his choosing, and that being known across American as “the little twat who doesn’t like bad words” is not going to help?

Because they should have explained that. It’s about parenting, readers. It’s about the children.

But what I was going to say about CPAC is too bad it ended before Obama rescinded BushCo’s restrictions on stem cell research, because then we’d really have some depths of misinformation to plumb. Even on NPR, reporters today made several references to the fact that the process of harvesting stem cells kills the embryo, without also stating that the embryos are donated by the people that created them, through their fertility clinics, and that the embryos are slated to be destroyed anyway.

But you’ll never hear the GOP suggest that fertility clinics be firebombed, or that their doctors should be shot, or that couples who authorize the destruction of their extra embryos are murderers. I wonder why.

Could it be because the circumstances of mostly well-off married mixed-gender couples attempting to conceive are more conducive to the Republican ideal than an assumedly single woman making a decision to dispose of an embryo on her own?

In other words, if a Republican couple offs an embryo at a clinic, and no Democrats are around exercising their right to choose, does the GOP make a sound?