Mysterious Me

What *am* I up to?  Today, over at the Register blog, I stuck up a humorous little video in which some wags with guitars register their lack of enthusiasm for the Amateur President.  Immediately, a reader complains:

I would prefer a more evenhanded critique of ALL politicians. I am amazed that anyone believes any good comes out of politics. I’m sick of certain segments of the orthodox Catholic bloc who think only in black and white. Conservative good/Liberal bad. They are useful idiots for any clever politician who mouths the conservative pro-life or pro-family message to get elected. Some true believers even labored to show how parts of the politician’s platform meshed with Biblical teaching. Worked well to get the evangelical vote; and then they did whatever they pleased after election.

 Just a few days ago, I was being arraigned by the guardians of truly true Catholic faith in the same comboxes as a secret Democrat shill for my grave sin of questioning Sharron Angle and Rich Iott. Diagnoses of my soul were flying thick and fast. One guy (the guy who was calling for the execution of prisoners at half-time, as well as the execution of Rush Limbaugh as a neocon war criminal, and defending the glories of the Wiking SS unit and the heroism of Josef Mengele) has even started a blog dedicated to documenting my fake Catholic, anti-Nazi, liberal deceptions.  (It’s named for Heimdall, the “white god”.  Get it?) 

Yet now it turns out I have a simplistic black and white Conservative good/Liberal bad ideology! Wondrous!

Just to be clear, I generally don’t support candidates from either party at the national level, since they generally ask me to support some grave intrinsic evil like abortion or torture. I reject the notion of “Lesser of Two Evils” Voting, since what you get when you do this is, you know, evil.

The standard rejoinder to this is “You can’t have a perfect candidate”, a fact most people with a pulse understand. I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking for candidates who are not seeking to implement policies worthy of the fires of hell. In short, I just want minimum decency, not perfection. So that whole lie is a red herring and it’s astonishing to me that any Catholic (much less most Catholics) can buy it so uncritically. But buy it they do, aloing with the astonishingly tribal lie that if you criticize Candidate Smith for any reason, then it follows you must support his opponent, Candidate Jones. My criticism of Obama’s incompetence does not imply “VOTE GOP!” any more than my criticism of Angle’s incredibly irresponsible remarks means “Vote for Reid.” If you think it does, then it may well be you who is thinking in black and white.

Speaking of which, noting that O’Donnell is, well, a bellicose idiot who thinks we need to stay in Afghanistan in order to finish the job of defeating the Soviets:

as well as having no idea what she’s babbling about when she says she objects to a number of Supreme Court cases but then can’t name a single one:

…could have more than one explanation.

Now it *could* be that I am once again undergoing the kaleidoscopic shapeshift that makes it impossible to understand what I think about American politics.

Or, on the other hand, it could be that I’m hoping that the Thing that Used to be Conservatism will return to, you know, conserving and will stop uncritically nominating complete dumbells merely because they bleat “I’m prolife!” as though that is a sufficient reason, rather than a mere condition for supporting a candidate. It could be that I want candidates who won’t embarrass the prolife cause. It could be that I want conservatives, not merely to win, but to govern wisely and well and not, oh, say, plunge us into a disastrous war and suck the economy dry with their incompetent governance, while doing nothing about the sole, all-excusing issue for which prolifers keep electing them.

But probably not. No. The real explanation is that I’m secretly an agent of the Democratic party.