Reality Bites For Conservatives

By William K. Wolfrum

One day the Earth will be a smoldering pile of death and destruction and just one person – holding all the world’s wealth – will exist. And if that person is a conservative, he or she will praise the Milton Friedman economics that got them there. Because if there’s one thing conservatives know, it’s that their ideas and beliefs have an anchor of failure tied to them in the history books. So, in order to wash off the stench of incompetent and greedy governance, conservatives consistently need to revise history.

Which is why you hear right-wingers spreading memes that include:

• That Ronald Reagan was the best President in history.
• That Joe McCarthy was on to something before leftist whiners shut him down.
• That any improvement of our current economy is due to George W. Bush’s policies.
• That Hitler was a liberal.
• That Herbert Hoover’s policies didn’t cause the Great Depression. FDR’s policies extended it.

Add to that Texas rewriting school history books to fit a conservative viewpoint and a conservative Bible in the works, and it becomes dreadfully apparent that conservatives have a serious problem with the reality that reality has dealt them.

And from personal experience, I know this is more than just devious plot by right-wingers to fix a huge image problem. It is that, of course, but it’s also more. It’s a trait. A characteristic, if you will. Because a few weeks back, a long-time conservative relative was telling me – in an effort to sound less conservative, that “he liked Clinton, and if memory served correct, even may have voted for him.” Having known this person when Clinton was President, all I know is that my relative went off on obscenity-laced diatribes whenever he was mentioned. Of course he didn’t vote for him.

The reality problem only gets bigger as top Conservatives work to create more of a single-minded group-think atmosphere amongst their followers. So now the right wing has its own Facebook! With Ricochet, finally conservatives can meet in a nice, liberal-free atmosphere:

Ricochet is the brainchild of two established conservatives, former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson and Hollywood producer-pundit Rob Long. “Rob and I felt there was plenty of space in the online world for a center-right website with a sense of fun, of talking back and forth among conservatives,” says Robinson. The left outweighs the right-wing in cyberspace, he says, even with everything from The Weekly Standard to Townhall.com populating the web.

Just imagine all the fun of Facebook mixed with the fact-free hilarity of Conservapedia and the intellectual give-and-take of a Red State thread. It’ll make getting into a fight with a drunk and jealous badger look like a good time. At least the badger won’t bring up Ayn Rand.

So basically, the conservative movement at the moment consists of fact-free opportunists like Sarah Palin, and ambitious pols like Newt Gingrich preaching to their choirs, while others like Karl Rove try to whitewash history to preserve damaged legacies. All of them are complaining about non-existent high taxes, and quite a few of them believe President Barack Obama is a Kenyan communist.

Heck, maybe the historical revisionism and lies will work and people will forget about how Republicans ran things from 2000-2008. But it’s just not healthy for the nation or the Republican Party. A while back, we used to refer to those who lived in alternate realities as “crazy.” These days we just call them conservatives. And whether intentional or not, their hold on reality is completely gone.

By: William K. Wolfrum

I'm a journalist, columnist, humorist, satirist, Dogist and Husbandist