"Conservatives" are traitors.

[hfojvt]

163. "liberals" are morons and hypocrites and hateful

I reach that conclusion reluctantly after seeing a poorly reasoned essay like this get 81 votes.

Of course, as I write that I wonder if that is the best way to begin, but a) it does express the disgust I feel and b) it is meant to be offensive. Your own negative reaction to my title is the same as the average conservatives reaction to your whole piece, and I make the effort because I really believe that most liberals are better than that. That if I try to reason with them (them being the OP and the 81 voters), that they will see reason.

But I also believe that most conservatives are better than that. I believe that if I, or we liberals, reason with conservatives, educate conservatives, that they too, at least many of them, at least enough of them to win a few of those election-thingies, can be brought over to our side.

A foolishly optimistic belief, but I keep trying.

See, I want to win those election-thingies. I want to defeat the Ryan budget, the Bush tax cut, the Bush invasion of Iraq, the Romney tax plan, the Brownback tax plan, the Brownback school finance 'reform', the Brownback KPERS 'reform' and so on. We defeat those things (or at this point undo those things which can be undone, and many unfortunately cannot be undone) by winning majorities to our side, not by gathering in small groups and proclaiming that everybody who disagrees with us is a 'traitor'.

Speaking of hyprocisy. For 8 years there was a lot of noise from the RightWing Noise Machine (RWNM) about how those of us who hated Bush and even those of us who opposed Bush were traitors. And we called BULLSHIT on that in no uncertain terms. But, oh boy, now that our guy is in the White House, we sure do seem to love the arguments that we used to find Unworthy of the First Amendment.

Well, I still call bullshit. Every American absolutely has the right to disagree with me (or even (gasp!) you) on anything and everything and has the right to speak and protest and vote for the things they want to. End of story. They can vote for English only, they can vote for Croatian only. They can push for a Constitutional Amendment making Mithraism the national religion. They can vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum or David Duke or any other nutball who legitimately files for office, including me, pretty pretty please. There is nothing treasonous about exercising your voting or first amendment rights - EVER.

Now here's a little thought experiment. Imagine that very same essay as this OP, except replace the word "conservative" with the word "liberal" and replace Ayn Rand with Karl Marx. What would WE think if we saw such an essay on Free Republic getting massive amounts of applause?