Conservative Love!

If you couldn't tell by the title, this has to do with love as only Conservatives are capable of showing it. So, heads up, because things can only go down hill from here.

A few Trigger Warnings - Animal Abuse for sure, with discussion of Slavery and racism in the Modern TEA Party - you know, the party that isn't racist - included.

You don't go to Arkansas expecting to find civilization, apparently. Also, you apparently can't find humanity there, either. For instance, take this act of terrorism "loan wolf extremism" (I'm preempting it. Because White Christians can't be terrorists; you have to pass the paper bag test and speak "dirka dirka" before you get considered a terrorist by our erudite and impartial media. And if you can show me that there are any other types of conservatives in that state, then I'll give you a cookie - I mean, is there like some kind of secret Haredim enclave in Central Arkansas? Further more, why does my brain rebel at the thought of Hebrew with a Southern Accent?). The organizer for the Arkansas democratic campaign came home one evening and found the cat belonging to his children murdered (WARNING! Graphic picture!) with the words "LIBERAL" scrawled across it (emphasis original):

Last night, Jake and his four kids had come back to their Russellville home. As they were getting out of the car, one of his children discovered their family cat dead on the front porch. One side of the animal’s head had been bashed in and an eyeball was hanging out of its socket. But there was something even more horrifying to be found on the corpse. Written across the animal’s fur in black marker was the word “LIBERAL“.

I await, with bated breath, our Liberal Media to make the conservatives who did this look like the animals they are, and blame everyone from Bill Kristol to Baby Fucking Jesus, who we all know was a conservative, for this act. To lead the pitchfork wielding, torch-carrying mob on those innocent conservatives when we all know that people who do things like this are an outlier, and no real true Christian Conservative Republican would do anything like this to a poor animal.

I'm a cat owner. I love my cat - she's one of the most adorable things in the world. The thought of something like that happening to her fills me with a mixture of disturbing hate and anger. This is not the action of a creature I want to share this species with.

Of course, I already know what Conservatives will say: "Oh, well, that's so horrible. But that's not real conservative who did that", and some fifty billion variations thereof. You know, the "No-True Scotsman" Fallacy, basically. If you trust conservatives on this matter, then there is no such thing as a conservative. I don't want to admit my side breeds so much contempt for individuals who think differently from myself that someone would be capable of doing this.

Or you get "But liberals do it too!" With no examples (maybe because we don't? PETA would require us to turn in our Liberal Card) or "Liberals are just as bad" and some variation on that. Basically, more projection. Victim blaming. Never stand up and criticize your own side. If someone does something like that, they weren't part of your tribe to begin with. This way, you can overlook the fact that yes, your side is responsible and yes, this is something your side is doing.

Speaking of things that conservatives do: I've heard plenty of White people whine and complain "why do we have to learn about slavery, huh? That's back in the past. It's nothing at all like that today. Why do we have to have it shoved in our face?" Never fear! Tennessee, in it's effort to eclipse Mississippi as the most dangerously stupid state in the union has decided to erase all evidence of slavery from the public education text books. See, in their turgid hard-ons for the founding fathers, the TEA Party on the state school board has take a page from Big Brother Joesph Stalin David Barton and Texas - if you don't like history, you can rewrite it.

In 2010, the conservatives who controlled the Texas Board of Education caused an uproar when they made radical changes to the history curriculum for the state’s 4.8 million public school students. The changes included referring to the country’s first black president as “Barack Hussein Obama,” and requiring students to “contrast” Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address with Abraham Lincoln’s philosophical views.

To whitewash one of the darkest practices in America history, conservatives proposed that textbooks refer to the slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade.”

Now Tennessee Tea Party members are taking their efforts a step further and trying to eliminate references to slavery in American history textbooks. Salon reports that Tea Partiers who fetishize America’s founders are “demanding” that students not be taught that many of them owned slaves

The difference between "Barack Hussein Obama" and Jefferson Davis (other than the scare quotes)? Jefferson was a fucking traitor who deserved to be strung from the capital and beaten like a dead horse. Jefferson was never president of anything but some petulant states who, in case I need to remind you, got their asses beat seven different ways from Sunday and deserved every bit of it.
I think it should be very clear where I stand on the issue. President Obama, while still an utter disaster on issues like constitutional rights and such, was legitimately elected. He is our president. Davis was never the legitimate president of anything other than a treasonous attempt to destroy this country. Suck it, TEA Party bastards. Hail to the Chief plays with a Black man walks into the room, and they can't fucking stand it.

But that's not even the most disturbing part of this whole thing.

I keep getting told that the TEA Party is not racist. They keep saying it, just like they keep saying they're patriots, and like they keep saying they're Christian, like they keep saying they love this country. Like they keep saying that they're a grassroots organization. So yeah, this isn't racist at all. We're only digging this up from the 1890s. It's "impolite" to mention some matters.

Slavery is an issue that we need to deal with. It, along with the genocide of the Native Americans, is the shame of this nation. It's not just something we did wrong, because that's massively understating it. We haven't sufficiently dealt with this issue, because apparently, people are still trying to run from it. Apparently White privilege gets invoked - I don't know why I have to know about it. My ancestors never owned slaves. I'm Irish! Yes, you are responsible because you're not standing up and owning up to it. This country doesn't just bury it's skeletons - it runs in fucking terror from them. Now the TEA Party once again never fails to disappoint, by continuing the tradition of whining, crying, and running in terror from it.

It goes deeper than that. This country was founded on slavery. It's in the Constitution. It was written in the Constitution. This moral failing is in the fabric of this country. It's part of the foundation. And this is not what gets taught. Instead, we tip-toe around it, without going into the graphic descriptions of what actually happened. I'm not trying to knock the Holocaust in any way, shape or form, but we have no problem doing this with the Holocaust (as we shouldn't). We show the videos (as we should), we see the pictures (as we should) and we listen to the stories (as we should). Is it because we weren't "responsible" for the Holocaust? We can say "Wow, those Germans were fucking monsters", but we can't say that about ourselves?

The only country more effective in whitewashing (pardon the pun) their history of horrific acts of inhumane violence and slavery carried out on different people is Japan. Turkey possibly comes in a close second - course, the world doesn't care about Armenians and Kurds anyway, among others (the noise you just heard was my blog getting banned from Turkey. I don't think I had any Turkish readers, though).

The U.S. displays that, once again, we can't handle our own actions. This is the very picture of privilege - I break something, then I run and hide behind it.

This isn't a fight for the "heart and soul" of this country. This country doesn't even have a "heart and soul."

And it's this absence of a heart and soul that allow conservatives to go out and murder the cat belonging to a politician's child to express their displeasure and erase slavery from the history books so they don't have to deal with the fact that their perfect hero cult is built around men who were just that - men, and hypocrites, too boot.