For the reference to “Amber and cruelty” see this post.

The Commissar of The Politburo Diktat says he is “done with Bush“.

Sadly, it was a post slightly later by the Commissar, someone who usually does not partake of the party-line kool aid, where he wrote in the context of the nomination of Harriet Miers to the office of Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court:

This might be hard for some to believe. Conservative bloggers and commentators are up in arms about the Miers’ nomination. Of course, since Conservatives are generally principled folks, and not blind cheerleaders, it shouldn’t be.

Unfortunately for me, this was the straw that broke the back of my camel.

I must dispute vehemently what the Commissar wrote. In my view, Conservatives are NOT “generally principled folks”, because if they were, then we would NOT be where we are now, both in the real world and in blogworld.

If Conservatives are “generally principled folks”, I am forced to ask, where were the Conservative principles in the past 5 years?

We did not arrive to this point in a flash, we traveled here in a series of stages, each stage of which I objected to at the time.

Do you want the list?

The USA PATRIOT Act

The energy bill

The recent transportation bill that has been universally admitted to be one of the most pork-laden bills ever passed

The USA PATRIOT Act II

The threat by the Bush administration to veto the bill that carries the anti-torture amendment

This isn’t even the entire list, just what I can come up with off the top of my head with no research.

The passage (or in the case of the last, the threat of veto) for each one of these bills violates “Conservative” principles, yet I hear no objections from the right-wing on them (unless of course, torture is a “conservative value”…).

Instead, at each stage, the self-described “Conservatives” downplayed MY objections and blindly supported the President they now condemn in terms that sound more like spoiled brats saying, “But Daddy, you PROMISED!!!!”

I am not trying to pick on the Commissar here, because he indeed has been one of the most reasonable self-described “Conservatives” of the past few years, yet his statement of Conservatives being “generally principled folks” was indeed the straw that broke my camel’s back.

I have been a voice in the wilderness for almost the entire life of this weblog, two years and eight months.

And now, suddenly, the “Conservatives” have had the scales fall from their eyes…

So, given that what I have been saying for the past 32 months is now being recognized by those “principled folks” I am forced to ask, where were those principles in the past 32 months?

NOTHING has changed in the behavior of President George W. Bush. The ONLY change is in how the “generally principled folks” who call themselves “Conservative” are viewing that behavior.

Conservatives are no more and no less principled than liberals, and if they feel they are more principled, they are kidding themselves.

The past five years have proven what those who call themselves “Conservative” do when THEY get power, and I see no difference between them and the so-called “Liberals” other than who are the recipients of the fruits of the corruption.

If you haven’t quite figured out how I feel about this, here is a final clue:

Do the fucking math yourself. It ain’t hard, if you’re willing to actually LOOK at the world.

Technorati Tags: commentary, politics, right wing, right wing politics, right wing weblogs, right-wing, right-wing politics, right-wing weblogs

From the MSNBC weblog Hardblogger comes a post from Bob Shrum, “A weakened president knows what he’s getting“, where he makes a pertinent comment and asks an even more important question:

… But in honesty, I don’t know why the right wing is flapping so furiously. Miers is likely to be the anti-Souter, a nearly anonymous choice who slips onto the Court and then hews the Scalia-Thomas line. Her statement when Bush picked her was drafted carefully to fire off buzz words like “strictly interpret” and hit the bull’s-eye of “original intent,” the odd notion that the Constitution is not a living document, but a parchment frozen in amber. She donated to a right to life group and led an effort to reverse the American Bar Association’s support for Roe v. Wade. (The Republican research machine was putting out that information and Cheney as fast as possible.)

I know, there are a few tea leaves floating on the other side: she was once a Democrat; once donated to a long ago Gore campaign; and when she was running for citywide office in Dallas, filled out a questionnaire saying that gays ought to be treated equally and AIDS ought to be treated and prevented. To the extent this rocks the right wing, I’m left with the question: To be conservative, do you have to be cruel?

Is it reasonable to say that we should adhere to “original intent” as if the Constitution were the Word of God? With all the changes in the past 220 years, is it even remotely realistic to contend that we must rigidly interpret everything in the light of men who were exactly that, fallible men, who were trying to assemble together a reasonable compromise between quarreling states?

The lingering question that arises when the words and actions of the radical-right are examined is more troubling, “To be conservative, do you have to be cruel?”

Answer that one yourself, for my answer is far more disturbing than the fact that question itself arises in the first place.

Technorati Tags: commentary, opinion, politics, recommended reading, right wing, right wing politics, right-wing, right-wing politics

I can’t wait to see this movie:

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

I’ve loved Wallace and Gromit ever since I saw the first short years ago, A Grand Day Out.

How can you not be captivated by a short film that can be summarized:

What do you do when you run out of cheese? Why of course, you go to the moon to get more, because everyone knows the moon is made of cheese!

Technorati Tags: movies, Wallace and Gromit, Wallace & Gromit