The funny thing is, up until a few years ago, I was always a small-c conservative, and I’m still generally a fiscal conservative. But the current crop of conservatives in North America have me so enraged with both the Republican Fascist Party (that’s my new name for them) and Canada’s Neo-Con Party (led by George Bush’s lap dog, Stephen Harper) that I hope for the permanent demise of both parties.
It seems inevitable that, at least in some way, my dream is going to come true south of the border. The Republican Party is (probably) smart enough to realize that they’ll never win another election until they distance themselves from the extremist American Taliban and KKKhristian factions. I really do hope the racist, ignorant, homophobic anti-science, apocalyptic theocrats spend the next 40 years “wandering in the desert” without a political voice (or secede and become the Mexican State of “Tay-has”). The “moderate” Republicans will just pin the whole global warming denial thing on the Jesus Freaks, and move on.
Canada’s a completely different story. We have a Conservative government, who seem to have learned all their tricks from Dubya, Darth Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Phil Gramm and friends. They don’t believe in evolution, and they don’t believe in global warming. Their only reading material seems to come from Republican think tanks and they’ve already started their “elitist” attack ads and we aren’t even in an election campaign. Unfortunately, there’s no internal rift to hope will explode.
It’s the climate change issue that I think has the best potential to destroy the party and end neo-conservatism in North America forever. Recently, Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, passed first reading, since we have a minority government and the majority of our MPs actually have principles. Every single Conservative MP voted against the bill.
But things have changed quickly, I think. The public support for action on global warming has recently become overwhelming. The Conservatives will have to do the biggest flip-flop in history or risk losing support everywhere but our oil-producing areas. It is a given to me that most people in the oil business will continue to deny global warming as long as it is in their narrow short-term self-interest, regardless of future consequences. But the rest of Canada has caught on, and I hope they punish the Conservatives severely for putting short-term financial gain against the future of humanity.
BTW, a word on “flip-flopping”, before I finish. Everyone, including the media, seems to treat changing your mind as one of the worst things a politician can do, even worse than lying. Personally, I respect when someone looks at the situation in depth and says, “I was wrong.” Breaking campaign “promises” is not much different, we all know that party platforms are based on what the party thinks has the best chance of getting them elected. Once they get in power, a good politician will do what he has to do, regardless of his ideology. That’s the problem with the Conservatives, they will never let evidence get in the way of their ideology, and that’s what makes them bad for the country.
Conservatism: Where the rich get a free ride; where programs that I don’t need are wasteful; where regulations that get in the way of me making more money are evil; where liberty means I get to do the torturing to justify illegal wars and where freedom of speech means I get to push my religion in your face but everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi, a socialist, a fascist, a communist or just plain unpatriotic. In other words, it’s all about me.
