It's Not a Party, It's a Mob

Recently, radio host Ed Schultz had Republican direct mail guru Richard Vigurie as a guest on his program. While Vigurie has moved outside the conservative mainstream with his opposition to the Iraq war, he's really only a few millimeters from the center. The Republican party has become extremely narrow in its scope and that mainstream is about as wide as a pencil line -- it's not extremely hard to be outside it. On every other issue, Vigurie sounds typical and on the issue of returning the GOP to power, he sounds typically wrong. Like everyone else on that side of the aisle, he argues that Republicans have to return to their "roots." They need to be about low taxes and free markets and return to fiscal discipline. None of this really caught my attention -- it's like wallpaper in the conservative room. The argument is made so often that you don't even notice it anymore.

But then he said something that showed the reasoning behind that argument. Reagan won twice using that message and Bush sr. won once, Vigurie argued, so we know the message works.

Now maybe Richard Vigurie doesn't have a calendar, but he doesn't seem to notice that it's been more than 16 years since Bush sr. won. Whatever it was that he thinks Dubya wasn't saying -- and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what that was -- that his dad and Reagan won with it isn't all that convincing an argument. Republicans seem to believe that they can stop history, that if they find that perfect message and build that perfect society, history will stop and we'll live in a free market Utopia forever -- Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority."

But, as I've pointed out recently, society evolves. As conservatives look to the past for their big winning message, they don't seem to notice that society moves forward. We're a species destined to live in the future, not the past. Nowhere is this failure to recognize reality more obvious than in social conservatism -- i.e., the religious right.

A new study shows that the number of people who list their religion as "none" has shot through the roof.

New research shows young Americans are dramatically less likely to go to church -- or to participate in any form of organized religion -- than their parents and grandparents.

"It's a huge change," says Harvard University professor Robert Putnam, who conducted the research.

Historically, the percentage of Americans who said they had no religious affiliation (pollsters refer to this group as the "nones") has been very small -- hovering between 5 percent and 10 percent. However, Putnam says the percentage of "nones" has now skyrocketed to between 30 percent and 40 percent among younger Americans.

Putnam calls this a "stunning development." He gave reporters a first glimpse of his data Tuesday at a conference on religion organized by the Pew Forum on Faith in Public Life.

According to the report, "This trend started in the 1990s and continues through today. It includes people in both Generation X and Y." So what does this have with the decline in the Republican party and the failure of conservative messaging?

"Many of them are people who would otherwise be in church," Putnam says. "They have the same attitidues and values as people who are in church, but they grew up in a period in which being religious meant being politically conservative, especially on social issues." For them, religious and political conservatism means "intolerance and rigidity and doctrinaire political views."

"That is the future of America," he says. "Their views and their habits religiously are going to persist and have a huge effect on the future." Republicans will have to change drastically to become attractive to these people. Put bluntly, they're going to have to lose their pro-hate positions.

But the problem there is that they've gone so far down this wrong road for so long that religious nastiness has become part of the Republican DNA. They've become so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they confuse bigotry for morality. And their anger at the infidels and sinful shows up as the stupidest goddam statements you could possibly make. Observe:

Associated Press:

A North Carolina congresswoman says she made a poor choice of words when she called the infamous murder of a gay Wyoming student a "hoax" to justify passing hate crimes bills.

Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx said during debate in the House that the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard shouldn't be used to justify a hate crimes bill because it wasn't a hate crime. Foxx said Shepard was killed during a robbery.

[...]

"We know that young man was killed in the commitment of a robbery. It wasn't because he was gay," Foxx said during debate. "The bill was named for him, the hate-crimes bill was named for him, but it's really a hoax that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills."

Foxx later apologized for a "poor choice of words," not for the statement itself. She seems to believe that two thugs who would beat a man to death because he's gay would never steal his wallet while they're at it. In her zeal to shoot down a hate crimes bill that would include gays and lesbians in its protections, her first impulse is to deny that such hate crimes even exist. The unspoken implication is that such hatred is justified.

In a similar, but much less offensive, remark, Republican Sen. John Thune warned President Obama yesterday not to nominate a gay for the Supreme Court. "I know the administration is being pushed, but I think it would be a bridge too far right now," he said. "It seems to me this first pick is going to be a kind of important one, and my hope is that he'll play it a little more down the middle. A lot of people would react very negatively."

Writes Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, "Thune, as a practical matter, is establishing a litmus test -- qualifications and merit are important, but homosexuality, regardless of any other factor, is more important. Why? Because Thune says so."

Democrats aren't off the hook here. States are legalizing same-sex marriage at a rate that must be alarming the religious right. If that rate continues, this issue will reach the federal level, thanks to Bill Clinton's mistake of signing the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law. That law bars the federal government from recognizing "same-sex relationships as marriages for any purpose, even if concluded or recognized by one of the states." This law will be repealed -- it's practically inevitable -- and Democrats will have to end their current strategy of paying out plenty of rope for the GOP to hang themselves with. They're going to have to pick a side.

As Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic explains, this could wind up in Barack Obama's lap. As more and more states legalize marriage equality, those marriages will be "entirely unrecognized by the federal government... and the thousand or so privileges accorded to married couples by the United States will remain unavailable to them. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending upon your point of view, but for the campaign version of Barack Obama, it is unfair. He promised, as a candidate, to push for federal recognition of same-sex couples even as he personally reiterated his opposition to gay marriage."

The numbers show that Democrats cannot lose by doing the right thing here. The messages of hate from the right and their traditional base are already turning people away in droves. As these issues of equality are forced onto the national stage, Republicans will lose even more voters as the rhetoric gets more fevered, more hateful, and -- frankly -- more stupid. Democrats can either stand on the right side of history and accept these new voters or watch as they just go away, disenchanted with politics, to join that great big pool of non-voters out there.

The Republican message may be anachronistic, but the Democratic message must be forward-looking and progressive. We should be willing to lose battles in favor of doing the right thing, so there's no reason for Democrats to shy away from a fight in which they can't do anything but win.

-Wisco


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Playing the Victim Card

Before we get started here, let me take a moment to explain who Amity Shlaes is. According to the blurb at the end of her column, "Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression is a Bloomberg News columnist." Forgotten Man is the Republican party's new favorite book, since it argues that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal actually made the depression worse, not better. In a nutshell, it wasn't the massive government spending on social programs and projects like the Golden Gate Bridge that set the economy right, it was the massive government spending on WWII that got us back on track. Self-contradictory, sure, but it gets even worse. Let me explain why this is exactly as ridiculous and absurd as it sounds. It'll only take a paragraph.

Imagine a proposal to fix the economy by refighting WWII. Not in a real sense, but by acting like we are. First, we retool nearly all manufacturing in America to build military weapons -- tanks, planes, rifles, munitions, parachutes, military uniforms, ships, etc. Then we take all of this stuff and we ship it over to Europe and the South Pacific, where we just blow most of it up. At home, we strangle commerce at the retail level by rationing everything. Fabrics, food, tires, gas, pots and pans, radios -- everything. Industrialists are doing OK, but no one else is getting a whole lot of business. Few people are taking out loans, because you really can't buy anything, and even savings accounts don't grow, because Americans are buying War Bonds instead of putting money into banks.

When you put it that way it, it looks really stupid, doesn't it? Which explains why Republicans are arguing that only tax cuts can save us. What they say worked to end the Great Depression would be disastrous in our recession -- and they know it.

But that's not the problem that Shlaes is writing about in her latest column. After writing a book putting across a crazy argument, Shlaes complains that mean liberal bloggers are calling Republicans liars and nutjobs.

So Michele Bachmann's version of history is "from another planet." Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, is "chronically stupid." And Eric Cantor of Virginia, the second-ranking Republican in the House, is "busy lying constantly."

That at least is according to posts on three left-leaning blogs.

Writers who are not pro-Barack Obama are suffering character assassination as well. George Will of the Washington Post, the nation's senior conservative columnist, has been so assaulted by bloggers that his editor, Fred Hiatt, recently wrote, "I would think folks would be eager to engage in the debate, given how sure they are of their case, rather than trying to shut him down."

The disconcerting thing isn’t that the bloggers or their guests did this slamming. We're used to such vitriol in campaign time. What is surprising is that the attacks are continuing after an election.

When you begin a column by rushing to the defense of Michele Bachmann's grasp of history, it's really hard to recover. Follow those links and you'll see that the only post that's even remotely unfair is the one calling Jindal "chronically stupid" -- and that's a republishing of a Talking Points Memo post under a completely different headline. The new headline calls him "chronically stupid," the body of the post is just a straightforward debunking of a lie. As far as Eric Cantor goes, he is constantly lying. As was George Will when WaPo got all the nasty mail.

And where has Shlaes been for the past eight years? Hands up, how many lefties out there have been told you were rooting for Saddam Hussein or had your patriotism attacked? Right wing rhetoric has been hateful for a long, long time. It was Sean Hannity who asked attorney Stanley Cohen, "Is it that you hate this president or that you hate America?" Tune into Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Michael Savage and tell me with a straight face that these people are respectful. If you've got a problem with the level of discourse in American politics, you're a little late in complaining about it, Amity. The time to do that was some time toward the beginning of the Clinton administration. As it is, that boat sailed a long, long time ago -- with Republicans at the helm.

"Because the ruling Democrats have tilted too far left, their allies are out on a mission of distraction, trying to prove that everyone else is too far to the right," Shlaes writes. It's not the best argument -- extremists tend to think they're mainstream. They aren't going to compensate. And "too far left" by whose measure? Certainly not the electorate's. As it is, only 1 in 5 identify themselves as Republican and Barack Obama still enjoys high approval ratings.

The truth is that the distraction is Shlaes'. Republicans are sinking like a stone and someone has to be blamed for it. Since Republicans show no willingness to change and, in fact, seem to believe that their ideas are brilliant, it has to be the fault of liberals. So bloggers are being mean and making Republicans look bad.

Amity Shlaes isn't the first to make this argument. She won't be the last. Republicans eager to blame liberals for what's basically their own damned fault aren't going to enjoy a lot of success with that message.

-Wisco


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Environmentalists are Trying to Kill You and Only Jesus and Republicans Can Save You

Yesterday, James Carville made a comment in an interview with Huffington Post. It got some play around the web, but didn't really make a lot of waves. Mostly because he said what everyone knows -- even those who would rather pretend otherwise. The Republican party, Carville said, was stuck with the religious nuts. If they try to get rid of them -- or even soften the message -- it's over.

"I don't think they can do that because their party would crumble... That is not an option really available to them," Carville said. "They can talk about other issues and do other things, but once you have a Republican nominee, or serious Republican leaders who are pro-choice or pro-gay marriage, they are going to lose a lot of their voting base. These people will break off. And I don't think that's a real open discussion among people that really know what is going on in the Republican Party."

The problem with the religious right is that their ideas don't really change. They add causes to their list of grievances, but most don't really subtract until that cause is resolved. As a result, they're stuck in time. The ultimate conservatives, they see an unchanging society continuing forever -- at least, after they've perfected it. So time moves on, while they stay stuck. The zenith of the evangelical fanatic has probably passed, the time when they could swing a national election their way is over. The Bush administration represented the last of it and Bush's wins in both of his elections were either questionable or unimpressive.

But the end of the religious right is a slow and painful death. They linger on, weakened and weakening, railing against a world that refuses to stop changing. They stand against knowledge when facts become inconvenient, choosing the bliss of ignorance. Anachronistic thinking is applauded, while innovative thought is shouted down. Stem cells are evil, abortion is evil, evolution is evil, gays are evil, people who don't say "Merry Christmas" are evil, liberals are evil, feminists are evil, and now people who recognize global warming are evil. Nothing must ever change, unless it changes back to the way things used to be, so new knowledge that would require us to change everything is about the worst thing imaginable.

Of course, the fact that it's also drawing people away from the evangelical zealot's brand of fanaticism isn't all that attractive either.





If you can get people to believe in creationism, you can get them to believe anything. Or, at least, that's what you'd think. But some in the evangelical movement are succumbing to this whole "save the world" mumbo-jumbo and abandoning the Republican party's message of climate ignorance.

Associated Baptist Press:

As Congress debates clean-energy legislation, a conservative Christian group is ramping up lobbying efforts to raise questions about the science of climate change.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation Committee recently hired Shannon Royce, a 25-year veteran of conservative organizations including the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, as executive director.

"If you listen to the hype that you will hear in the media, you will hear that evangelicals really feel strongly about global warming, and the impression is that all evangelicals have bought into this global-warming bandwagon, and it simply is not true," Royce said in an interview [mp3] on a Christian radio station in Chicago.

Royce calls global warming "pseudoscience" and literally accuses environmentalists of killing Christians.

"The environmental extremists, and frankly unfortunately even some of our left-wing evangelical friends, see people predominantly as polluters and consumers," she said. "Now what do you have to do if people are predominantly polluters and consumers? You need less people. It's not necessarily that these groups are the same groups that would promote abortion abroad. They just won't let us get food to those people, so they die naturally. It's not the same as killing them directly, maybe, but it's still really against the principles of what we believe as Christians."

Cornwall Alliance spokesperson Calvin Beisner testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, telling representatives that global warming's a bunch of hooey because the "work rests on the naturalist, atheistic world view." See, God's perfect, so it stands to reason that the world He created is too. A real Christian "sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God's creation and providential preservation and therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating." Put simply, you can't screw up the planet because the world is magic.

What was that about pseudoscience again?

If Carville's right that the GOP needs the religious right to stay alive -- and he is -- then the reverse is also true. Without a national party to do their work in Washington, the religious fanatics would be seriously screwed. If the religious fanatic flock starts to wander off in non-Republican directions, groups like Cornwall Alliance exist to send out wranglers to bring them back to the herd. Besides, these errant Christians are better off spending their energy hating gays, trying to force women to remain pregnant against their will, and fighting the menace of evolution in our schools. For the institutional side of the religious right, global warming is a distraction.

But if the Republican influence in America is on the decline, so is the influence of the religious right. Standing against change in the world is a losing proposition that involves something they don't believe in - evolution. People adapt to the times they live in, while conservatives of both the religious and political types believe the times should adapt to the people. People are wandering away from these "core issues" of movement conservatism and toward issues that actually matter for the time they live in. Republicans and the religious right, ignoring evolution, fail to learn one of its central lessons -- adapt or die.

The Earth may not be "robust, resilient, and self-regulating," but the political landscape is. It's self-regulating those who refuse to change right out of existence.

-Wisco


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Pro-Torture = Pro-Cowardice

This will be the second morning post in a row where I write about my process, so bear with me. I generally bookmark the articles I'll need the night before and -- as needed -- add notes. One of the notes I wrote last night was "Hinderaker, as always, is being a freakin' idiot." Only I didn't use "freakin'" -- I try to cut back on the expletives in my longer posts.

Hinderaker is John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog and his freakin' idiocy is looking at crimes of torture by a member of the United Arab Emirates' royal family as proof that the Bush administration didn't torture.

The current debate over "torture" -- the waterboarding of three high-level al Qaeda leaders in order to obtain information about threatened attacks -- is an example of public discourse at its worst. From Barack Obama on down, most of what has been said by critics of harsh interrogation has been dumb, disingenuous or both. Waterboarding is, as I've often said, a humane alternative to actual torture. It frightens (even when, as in the case of the three al Qaeda terrorists, they are told beforehand that it may feel like they're drowning, but they won't) but does no physical harm. None.

See? A freakin' idiot. First off, he's just plain wrong. Physicians for Human Rights tells us that of 112 deaths in US detention, 43 were homicide, with 3 resulting in charges of murder and 3 resulting in charges for voluntary manslaughter. 11 of those deaths involved "blunt trauma or asphyxiation." Hinderaker seems entirely ignorant of the fact that, since waterboarding is actually drowning someone (forget that "simulated" crap you hear in the media), you can waterboard someone to death -- easily. Calling it a "humane alternative to actual torture" suggests that John's either a gullible ass or a lying ass. Frankly, I don't think it makes much difference which is more accurate. He's an ass and that's as detailed as the description needs to be.

Second, he's basically saying, "Torture? I'll show you torture!" The UAE torturer in question -- Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan -- was brutal in his abuse. "Believing he was cheated in a business deal, the member of the United Arab Emirates ruling family was trying to extract a confession from an Afghan grain dealer," CNN reported. "With a private security officer assisting, Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan is seen [in a video] stuffing sand in the Afghan’s mouth. As the grain dealer pleads and whimpers, he is beaten with a nailed board, burned in the genitals with a cigarette lighter, shocked with a cattle prod, and led to believe he would be shot. Salt is poured on his wounds."

"In the end, the victim can muster up only weak moans as an SUV is repeatedly driven over him." Surprisingly, the man survived.





Yeah, that's certainly torture. But how low is Hinderacker willing to set the bar here? This is basically the Hitler defense -- because someone, somewhere once did something much, much worse, what you're advocating is perfectly OK. In other words, Hitler killed millions, so if you fall short of that, you're automatically innocent. Logic it is not. "At least we're not running over detainees with an SUV" is no defense at all.

I'm not attacking Hinderacker alone; he's just my example. When I read about the UAE torture story, I knew someone would make exactly this argument. Hinderacker's was just the first I came across. This is what torture is doing to us -- we have to find some demented middle eastern sadist in order to have someone to compare ourselves favorably to. Bush's torture policies have made us a sick, sick culture. Not only do we have people defending torture, we have people saying we should do more of it -- completely without shame.

And why didn't we run over detainees with Jeep Cherokees? Why not? All of the defenses of torture would still apply. You've got your ticking timebombs and your massive terrorist attacks. If it takes running over one guy to save millions, the right wing argument goes that we have to park a truck on someone -- we really have no choice. Running people over with big freakin' SUVs and beating them with boards with nails in them is practically an American value. If Hinderacker is against it, then he's for the terrorists. At least, if he's at all interested in being consistent in his arguments.

And is waterboarding torture? Of course it is. In fact, a New York Times story out this weekend shows that even as the "harsh interrogations" were going on, the interrogators knew it was torture.

The proclamation that President George W. Bush issued on June 26, 2003, to mark the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture seemed innocuous, one of dozens of high-minded statements published and duly ignored each year.

The United States is "committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example," Mr. Bush declared, vowing to prosecute torture and to prevent "other cruel and unusual punishment."

But inside the Central Intelligence Agency, the statement set off alarms. The agency's top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, called the White House to complain. The statement by the president could unnerve the C.I.A. interrogators Mr. Bush had authorized to use brutal tactics on members of Al Qaeda, Mr. Muller said, raising fears that political winds could change and make them scapegoats.

Bush came out publicly against torture and the CIA needed to be reassured that he didn't really mean it. That's an odd reaction from a group of people who know they aren't torturing anyone, isn't it? If you didn't know better, you'd assume they thought they were torturing people. Weird.

This is the problem with all the "it's not torture" arguments -- they rely so heavily on ignorance and illogic that you have to assume those making them are either sick and soulless liars or suffering from a massive, untreated head wound. You either have to be lying or mentally incompetent to take these positions. And you either have to be a coward or gullible to buy them.

And cowardice is what it all comes down to. Fearmongering appeals to the fearful, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that those who fall for it are cowards. Before Bush's torture program came out, no one was arguing that we should start torturing people. It would've been unthinkable. But now that they've managed to scare themselves stupid with talk about "existential threats" and a global "Islamofascist" movement, they're all for it -- to the point where only the sickest and most brutal abuse is out of the question. If we charitably assume that they were never for torture before, we can also assume that they've now sold out their beliefs for safety. As I said, that's cowardice.

That's what this argument really boils down to -- it's not pro- or anti-torture, it's pro- or anti-cowardice. Are you willing to take the risks inherent in being a free people who respect the rule of law or are you more inclined to be a fair-weather patriot who believes in American values only so long as they're convenient? Are you willing to accept that bravery is required of a free people or are you going to embrace your inner coward?

I've made that choice. It wasn't really all that difficult. Apparently, those on the right are having a harder time with it.

-Wisco


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Hang on Tight, Things are Going to Get Stupid

I generally have my morning post planned the night before. I find the story I want to write about, bookmark all the sources and citations I want to use, and I'm done. All that's left is to arrange it all into a cohesive and logical statement of some kind. Sometimes, while I'm doing this, the news landscape completely changes and what I was planning on writing about gets blown out of the water by new information. At other times, most of the information I've gathered still works, but the focus of the post changes. The news that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is going to retire is an example of the latter. In this case, I was going to write about how screwed Republicans are. Souter's retirement changed that slightly -- now I'm writing about how much more screwed they're going to be.

First off, what I was originally planning to write about; internal polling shows the Republican party is losing every argument. Partial polling results leaked to the Associated Press shows that the GOP is "widely viewed by the public as less competent than Democrats to handle issue ranging from health care to education and energy." AP says the polling was "presented to top GOP officials in Congress." The poll also shows that Obama has been making significant gains among "self-described conservative, independent voters."

The Associated Press obtained partial results of the survey, which was conducted in late March by New Models, a firm with close ties to Republicans. GOP lawmakers in Congress have generally opposed Obama's early legislative agenda, voting with near unanimity against economic stimulus legislation and unanimously against a White House-backed budget that cleared Congress on Wednesday.

The survey found the public holds greater confidence in Democrats than in Republicans in handling most of the issues that are involved in Obama's legislative agenda.

Democrats were favored by a margin of 61 percent to 29 percent on education; 59 percent to 30 percent on health care and 59 percent to 31 percent on energy. Congress is expected to consider major legislation later this year in all three areas.

The only issue that Democrats didn't lead Republicans on was the "war on terror." And even there they weren't ahead, the poll put both parties at a tie on the issue. The Republican party has no advantages, only disadvantages.





Worse, the defection of Arlen Specter to the Democratic party has moderate Republicans complaining that many their party are out to get them -- and they're right.

The solution to all of this is to put together a "panel of experts" and send them on a big PR tour. "Experts at what?" would be a good question, since the panel is made up of former Republican National Committee head Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

So basically four right wing ideologues and John McCain -- who I guess is still supposed to be some kind of "maverick." To give you an idea of how wrongheaded this whole idea is, Sarah Palin is reportedly also being considered.

These people will go around the country holding townhall events and report back to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. Still, give them points for trying. The best thing they could possibly take away from these things is that everyone thinks they're crazy. And the best and most constructive thing they could do in response would be to spend most of their energy putting bags over the heads of party members like Michele Bachmann and downplaying the influence of the base -- who are crazy.

So the news that David Souter is going to retire must've come as bad news to any Republican interested in actually rebranding the party and thinking two or three moves ahead. There's nothing on Earth that brings the crazies out of the woodwork like a Supreme Court nomination. I can practically guarantee that someone's out there, writing a chain-email claiming that Barack Obama is going to appoint a radical Islamist to the court in order to bring Sharia law to the United States, right now, as you read this.

The craziness is already starting to seep in. In a press release, Americans United for Life pretty much demands that Barack Obama, the pro-choice president, nominate a pro-life judge. And they seem to think this is reasonable. Over at the conservative National Review, legal pundit Ed Whelan warns that Barack Obama "should be made to pay a high price for appointing a liberal judicial activist who will do his dirty work for him."

When you're going to try to convince everyone that you're not crazy, it's probably a little counterproductive to have the base engaging in shrieking, hyperbolic insanity. And the sad fact -- sad for Republicans anyway -- is that there's absolutely no way to stop that from happening. The religious right is going to lose it, the gun lobby are going to lose it, the people who see socialism everywhere are going to lose it, the people who think Obama's a terrorist mole are going to... well, the people who think Obama's a terrorist mole are going to lose it even more. You think those teabaggers made for bad PR? Imagine them doing that as a fulltime job.

This new Republican PR push is probably doomed now. Souter's retirement will shine a spotlight on the insanity of the movement conservatives. If you're trying to convince everyone you're not crazy, it's not helpful to have all your lunatic friends vouching for you.

-Wisco


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