| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Andrew Sullivan | ||||
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I don't usually post these interviews, but I thought this was interesting. Andrew Sullivan is a conservative who supports Barack Obama.
Now, he's a gay man, but he supported Barack Obama in 2008, too, long before Obama came out in support of gay marriage. (Note that he considers civil rights for homosexuals to be a conservative stand, and he has a real point. But that's certainly not "conservative" as it's defined these days!)
Stephen Colbert - in his persona as a right-winger - attacks him for being wrong in 2008, for thinking that Barack Obama could lead us away from those Nixonian culture war battles.
Andrew Sullivan: "I was only wrong in thinking that the Republican Party might just have the good grace and patriotism to actually cooperate with an incoming president in any way whatsoever. ...
"I just think, when you've just got elected president - you're in the worst recession since the 1930's - you might get more than zero votes on your first stimulus package. I'm sorry. They set out to destroy this guy from the get-go, which is why re-electing him is the most important thing, to destroy that [element?] in our politics. ...
"I hope that defeating them [the Republicans] this time might break that fever and bring conservatism back to the center, where we need it."
Why aren't more conservatives this honest and this sensible? Well, it might be because "conservative," as a definition, has lost all rational meaning.
Really, what's conservative about vastly increasing our federal debt by giving tax cuts to the wealthy? What's conservative about considering corporations to be "people" and money to be "speech"? What's conservative about putting the government in people's bedrooms, and between a woman and her doctor?
What's conservative about destroying our environment, mining our oceans, and using up our natural resources as fast as humanly possible? Isn't conservation "conservative"? What's conservative about undermining America's institutions? What's conservative about chipping away at our traditional - and constitutional - separation of church and state?
I could go on and on. "Conservative," these days, is anything but. And yet, Andrew Sullivan is nearly unique, a conservative who's rational enough, honest enough, and brave enough to say these things - and to fight the crazies who've been redefining the term.
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2 comments:
Michael Moore calls his shot: Romney WILL WIN in November.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/michael-moore-mitt-romney_n_1843824.html
Jeff, Michael Moore is a film-maker, not a political analyst (not that I'd believe a political analyst, either). He has a point about getting out the vote - Obama leads two to one among people who don't plan to vote, anyway - but right now, this is nothing more than a wild guess.
If young people voted as reliably as the elderly do, Barack Obama would win in a landslide. But they don't. It's ironic, isn't it? You'd think it would be the other way around, since young people are going to have to live in this world longer.
What scares me more than anything is that the Romney campaign feels free to lie as much as they want. They clearly don't expect any negative consequences from that. Well, they're following Karl Rove's playbook, and it's worked well for the right-wing so far.
If we Americans are dumb enough to fall for it again, I guess we deserve what we're going to get. (But I don't deserve that, and neither do you, I'm sure.)
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