Choices, Choices

I know this guy.

We’ve never been what you could call close, but suddenly he won’t speak to me at all.

Why?

Well, see that’s the funny part.  He won’t speak to me because he’s embarrassed.  And not just embarrassed, but red-faced like Christine O’Donnell caught on security camera video buying a shower massager. 

Here’s the thing, this guy I know, he’s a lifelong conservative who is mortally afraid of hippy Liberals, tree kissing moderates, and those nefarious skulking progressives and their all-pervasive socialist/commie agenda.  He’s 100% sure that the President of the United States is a reptile in a rubber human suit who sucks the blood from white babies on an alter made from Saul Alinsky’s devil magic Jew bones and about 90% convinced that Obama is the literal anti-Christ as foretold by Nostradamus (see, according to the venerated Quatrains, if you rearrange the letters in “Obama” and push on the side of your eyeballs with the tips of your index fingers while sniffing gasoline vapors it spells “Secret FEMA Fascist Death Camps of Death!”). He’s been stockpiling ammunition because he’s absolutely sure that the fiendish Nancy Pelosi is personally coming for our guns with her army of genetically engineered atheist super-ninjas and she’ll probably have gay abortion doctors insert a microchip into our brains while we’re sleeping that will make us all believe people evolved from monkeys or space aliens or something. He once received spam on his computer that contained a picture of, shudder, teh nekkid gaiboy and he’s been waiting for the FBI to show up and cart him away ever since – because as you know, there was this guy once who knew somebody who was related to this guy who accidentally looked at some porn on the Internet, totally unintentionally of course, but was arrested for perversion and THE LIBERALS FRAMED HIM AND PUT HIM AWAY FOR TWENTY YEARS (probably in a FEMA Death Camp of Death, it’s twue!). He’s pretty sure revolution is coming, orchestrated by the Al Gore Global Warming Illuminati or the New World Order or Hitler’s Electrified Brain in a pickle jar.  And it’s just a matter of time until the Liberals totally turn America into a socialist nightmare like Canada.

Needless to say, he tends to vote Republican. Period.

That said, this time around he’s  going to have to vote for…a…gasp…a…oh God this is so embarrassing…uh...a…Democrat.

See, he didn’t like Murkowski because he didn't think she was conservative enough, so he didn’t go vote in the primaries, just like 83% of his neighbors here in Alaska.  As a result he ended up with Joe Miller as the conservative candidate. He can’t support Miller (for a number of reasons that I’m not going to mention since I’m going out of my way not to identify him) and in fact feels that he really must oppose Miller’s election, i.e. he’s going to have to vote against Miller. Voting for the Greens or the Independents makes him start to hyperventilate and break out in a rash.  That leaves him with one option, vote for the Democrat (well, two options actually, since Murkowski has now declared a write-in campaign. Good luck with that, losers, really).  What’s so galling for this guy is that the Democrat, Scott McAdams is a damned decent fellow, intelligent, well liked, respected, experienced, reasonable, moderate, centrist – yes, yes, to a Republican that equates to Hippy Liberal Homo Baby Sodomizer, but in truth McAdams is a hell of a lot closer to Murkowski than Angry Joe (and speaking of write-in campaigns, if Murkowski actually had any class she’d have endorsed McAdams and told Miller to shove it up his hairy ass while singing the Star Spangled Banner, instead she decided to act like the second coming of Ralph Nader, but I digress). It really bugs him that McAdams is a decent guy and might actually get elected - see, he could hold his nose and vote for McAdams as long as McAdams didn't actually get elected. That way he could vote against the carpet bagger Miller, but still get a Miller anyway.  The danger, in his mind, is that he's going to have to vote for a democrat in protest, with the very real possibility that the democrat will actually get elected - and Alaska will have two liberal Senators.

Holy Hell!
 
But he’s going to do it, vote for a democrat, for the first and probably only time in his life. 

And it embarrasses him, hell it’s mortifying. He has spent his entire life thinking of democrats as The Hated Enemy of America. He listens to Rupert Murdock’s harem of talking heads and they tell him that liberals aren’t like real Americans. Democrats are the party of queers and queens, commies and socialists, lazy pot smoking draft dodging hippies, ball busting flat chested childless hairy legged bulldykes, and Green Peace.  They’re anti-business and anti-military and anti-freedom and anti-American. 

He considers having to vote for a democrat as an act of treason.

It scares him shitless.

I strongly suspect that he’s not alone. 

In fact, I strongly suspect that hell of a lot of conservatives woke up this morning with the sick realization that their side of the ballot has been Shanghaied by right-wing extremists. 

Here in Alaska we’ve got the aforementioned Angry Joe.  He looks good, handsome, bearded Alaskan (Alaskans dig beards, unless they’re on Muslims), West Pointer, veteran, Bronze Star. Lawyer (wait, what?).  He’s got some reasonable ideas (personally I think his suggestions for a balanced federal budget and a constitutional clause in each bill before Congress have some merit, I don’t think they’re workable as Miller has stated them, or that either has a chance in hell of making it out of committee, but that doesn’t mean they are entirely bad ideas). He’s not dangerously insane, though he may be dangerously narrow minded. What he is, is dangerously hard right and in thrall to the outsiders of the TEA Party Express and he owes his soul to Sarah Palin.  He’s stated more than once, both expressed and implied, that he only represents TEA Party Conservatives and the rest of us can go hang.  He wants to end earmarks - as a Senator of a state that depends more than any other on earmarks, and that scares the ever living shit out of Alaskan conservatives who venerate Ted Stevens nearly to sainthood. Joe doesn’t compromise.  He intends to increase the obstructionism in Congress, not reduce it. He’s the typical Type-A GI Joe product of West Point and the military promotion system, a bullheaded Army officer, might makes right and it’s his way or the highway.  And a whole lot of Alaskan conservatives who never bothered to vote in the primaries are kicking themselves in the ass right now, wondering how our former half-term quitter of a Governor and the TEA Party Express zealots, from California of all goddamned places, managed to push Murkowski off the ballot.

In Delaware, conservatives face the same dilemma. They can stay home, or they can vote for Christine O’Donnell.  She’s attractive, in a former plaid-skirted Catholic girl who found UberJesus after her college years of pot and anal sort of way.  She’s got a blazing smile and a burning ambition. She’s the darling of the TEA Party and the Palin heir apparent.  And this morning the press is flogging themselves blind in an orgy of web-fingered self-gratification over O’Donnell’s stance (heh, heh) on masturbation, dirty dirty sex, and witchcraft (it’s like the mother lode for the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers, and late night monologues).  But frankly, if I was a Delaware conservative, I’d be less concerned about whatever silly nonsense this vapid woman said fifteen years ago and a whole lot more concerned about where she stands right now. Like the fact that she used to be a Catholic but now she’s a fanatical evangelical who has made it very clear that she would like nothing better than to turn her version of Christianity into public policy. See? That would concern me a whole lot more than whether or not she blew a guy on a Wiccan altar when she was a teenager. She claims that she has heard the actual voice of God. Let’s repeat that, Christine O’Donnell believes that she has actually heard the voice of God, the actual voice not some vague feeling but the actual voice of the Almighty in her empty little head. We put people in the boobyhatch for hearing the voices in their heads, but elect Christine and she'll be following the advice of the imaginary people in her head to guide her hand in Congress. Really, think about that for a minute or two, then breath into a paper bag for a while until your despair passes. Despite trumpeting the conservative flimflam snake-oil of fiscal responsibility, she has one hell of a lot of trouble paying her own bills, including her taxes (one strongly suspects that might be her motivation for joining an outfit that retconned its name to Taxed Enough Already, but again, I digress) and shamelessly used campaign contributions to (allegedly) pay her rent - something she's currently under investigation for.  She talks about reducing the size of government and the Constitution, but in the same breath explains how the federal government owns a woman’s reproductive system.  Sex in general, it seems, is something that O’Donnell feels is subject to regulation in accordance with her religious beliefs (you can see why that would scare the hell out of certain conservative members of Congress and Evangelical Christendom, can’t you? Oops, look at that, yet again I digress).

In Nevada, conservatives can thank Sarah Palin and the TEA Party for crapping out Sharron Angle like a glowing radioactive turd of crazy. I’ve written about Angle before, you remember, she’s the special TEA Party Conservative that believes God has women raped to teach them a lesson. Have fun with that Nevada.

Across the land, TEA Party candidates, hand selected by Sarah Palin, are crowing their victories.

My personal favorite? Carl Paladino, TEA Party wackjob for Governor of New York.

Carl wants to convert underused state prisons (Underused? Underused state prisons? How many of those does New York have? I'm just asking here) into welfare islands, fill them with the poor, who he will then force into working for the state in "military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service." Yes, that’s right, Carl wants to round up poor people, put them in prison, and impress them into bondage to the state. Slavery and debtor’s prison – except the inmates in question are not debtors, they’re just not Republicans.  Think about that, really think about it very carefully.  Let's round up the undesirables and put them in camps where work will set them free.  Where have I heard that before? Where? And as if reviving concentration camps and the Gulag system isn't enough, Paladino has declared that as governor he’ll use eminent domain to seize the "Ground Zero Mosque” property and turn it into a "War Memorial."  Hell, as Lord-Governor he says he'll seize all property owned by Muslims on so-called sacred ground. What does Paladino define as sacred ground? Everywhere that the dust from the collapsing World Trade Center towers settled. Basically all of Manhattan (and apparently parts of New Jersey too. Honestly, New Jersey sacred ground? Hmmmm. Heheheheheh. Okay. Sure.  In actuality, dust from the collapsing towers was carried for hundreds of miles all the way to the Midwest United States, we're going to be rounding up a lot of Muslims, I'm just saying).  Paladino is an unabashed racist and doesn’t really care who knows it – preferring instead to blame liberals for his outlook on life. No word if he also blames the child he fathered in an extramarital affair on the democrats as well, but he's promised to impose traditional "family values" on the citizens of New York if elected. That ought to be fun.
 
Faced with such choices across the country, it’s really no wonder why a lot of Conservatives today are suffering a crises of conscience.  They either get to vote for the batshit crazies, or a Democrat. They’re finally waking up to something that’s been obvious to me for a long, long time – that their party has been highjacked by extremists while they were asleep at the switch. While they were busy acting like snotty petulant children, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and the TEA Party Conservatives stole their party away from them. Increasingly, those conservative politicians that aren't TEA party stalwarts are faced with a dilemma, either they start acting like hardliners and court the extremists or one day they'll wake up to find that they've been branded a RINO and they're running a write-in campaign like Murkowski.

Embarrassed?

Damned right, they're embarrassed. They should be embarrassed.

But not half as embarrassed as they’ll be if these stupid bastards get elected.

---

* Note: I use the term “Tea Party Conservative” as specifically distinct from the standard issue conservative, the way a rabid hyena is distinct from other canidae.