Part of me wants to think that people like this are a rarity, and aberration that is not at all indicative of Conservatives in general. The problem is that there are a LOT more people like this out there than people like myself are willing to admit. It's a truly frightening prospect.
Here are some things that Christopher Nunneley, a conservative activist in Birmingham, Alabama, believes. That some time in June, apparently unnoticed by the world media, George Bush negotiated an end to the civil war in Sudan. That Bill Clinton is "lazy" and Teresa Heinz Kerry is an "African colonialist." That "we don't do torture," and that the School of the Americas manuals showing we do were "just ancient U.S. disinformation designed to make the Soviets think that we didn't know how to do real interrogations."
Chris Nunneley also believes something crazy: that George W. Bush is a nice guy.
It's a rather different conclusion than many liberals would make. When we think of Bush's character, we're likely to focus on the administration's proposed budget cuts for veterans, the children indefinitely detained at Abu Ghraib, maybe the story of how the young lad Bush loaded up live frogs with firecrackers in order to watch them explode.
OK, so the live frogs bit reflects on little more than a prounounced adolescent cruelty. While revolting, I can't see what impact on Bush's Imperial Presidency. What scares the hell out of me are the people who worship everything Bush stands for with an almost Stepford Wives-like glazed smile on their faces.
I'm not particularly put off by people holding different opinions than I do. I hardly claim the mantle of political righteous and rectitude. Having said that, it does bug the hell out of me when people turn into what Rick Perlstein calls "conservatives who construct towers of impressive intellectual complexity on toothpick-weak foundations"....and then react to differing opinions as if they are they height of heresy and treason....
"He's very compassionate," says Chris, an intelligent man who's open-minded enough to make listening to liberals a sort of hobby. "If you look at the way he's bucked the far right: I mean, $15 billion for AIDS in Africa!" He speaks at the church services of blacks, and "you don't fake that. That's not just a photo op."
Of course, two years after Bush made his pledge, only 2 percent of the AIDS money has been distributed (in any event, it will mainly go to drug companies). And appearing earnest in the presence of African Americans has been a documented Bush strategy for wooing moderate voters since the beginning.
It's Josef Goebbel's time-honored "Big Lie" theory writ large- repeat something often enough, even to yourself, and it eventually becomes the truth. Too many Conservatives have swallowed BushCo's propaganda to the point where they would sooner run naked through their front yard than question the actions or veracity of Our Sainted President and his minions.
A wise man once told me that "stupid people elect stupid people". While I recognize that "stupid" is hardly the monopoly of Conservatives, there is a pronounced difference between stupid Progressives and stupid Conservatives. At least the Progressive ignorami are relatively harmless, and can generally be found tilting at windmills (or still going door to door for Dennis Kucinich). The Conservative anti-intelligentsia can quite frankly be downright dangerous. My experience is that vacant Conservatism is as much a product of and reaction to Right-Wing propaganda as anything resembling rational thought and analysis. (They also tend to vote in greater numbers that clueless Progressives, but that's another issue.)
Aggressive and unflinching ingnorance in service of ANYTHING is a truly frightening thing to behold. I'm constantly amazed that normally lucid, seemingly intelligent people can ignore the abject reality of the Bush years when it doesn't suit their neatly organized and thoroughly propagandized and impressively sanitized view of the political world.
Be afraid...be very afraid.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
