Pic Of The Moment: Conservatives Shocked And Disgusted By Utterly Inoffensive Coca Cola Ad

[Jack Rabbit]

68. No, Earl, these aren't conservatives.

I would like against to make my pitch for decoupling the terms conservative and right wing. When they are conflated, we get those ridiculous moments like last week when RNC chairman Reince Priebus demands MSNBC President Phil Griffin to be made to all "right of center" Americans for a tweet saying that "right wingers" will hate the new Cheerios TV spot featuring a bi-racial American family. The really ridiculous part is that Phil Griffin actually apologized.

A conservative is a person with whom I disagree more often than not, but who is capable of making a rational case for keeping taxes low. At least he's expecting some bang for his buck when the government takes it. I wouldn't include the modern Reagan worshipers as conservatives, since one cannot possibly make a rational argument to cut taxes on the "job creators" since, first of all, all empirical evidence shows that cutting taxes to this level on the wealthy starves state and local governments for revenue that might be used for such unnecessary things as repairing roads, preparing for hurricanes or educating children and second, "job creators" have an abysmal record of creating jobs in the decade since the Frat Boy and the Republicans drastically cut their taxes.

A right winger is more interested in social values than economic issues, and his interest is what groups to exclude from social or political participation. Generally speaking, these people are bigots or one kind or another and usually several at once. These are the people who call the late Trayvon Martin a "thug" with no evidence that his behavior fit that epithet and conflate speaking Spanish with being a illegal alien, as in the above remarks on the Coca Cola spot. These are the people who support using voter ID to bar people they don't want voting from polling places and forcing women contemplating terminating a health threatening or otherwise unwanted pregnancy to get a vaginal ultrasound. They assume all Muslims are terrorists, all blacks are stupid, lazy and violent, all Hispanics are illegal aliens no matter where they born and any woman who insists on making her own health decisions is a slut. In short, they are racists, sectarian bigots and misogynists. It is no wonder why the sentiments expressed by these people about the Coca Cola ad are more fitting coming from a member of the Ku Klux Klan than a Republican member of Congress, or at least it used to be before Jesse Helms became the model for Republican members of Congress.

Which brings us back to Reince Priebus and his insistence last week that Phil Griffin apologize to all Americans "right of center." Neither Mr. Griffin nor anyone else owe an apology to the reprobates in the Ku Klux Klan or the neo-Nazi movement, to misogynists like Mike Huckabee or Phyllis Schlafly (yes, she's a misogynist), to sectarian bigots like Pam Geller or Frank Gaffney or to social elitists like Dave and Charlie Koch, who think they have some divine right to rule over the rest of us because they have money. Mr. Priebus knows what his party represents these days when he demanded an apology from a television executive for a tweet directed at "right wingers" who would find something intrinsically offensive about a biracial family and didn't use the word the word "Republican" at all. By demanding such an apology, Republican National Committee Chairman Priebus has admitted that the his party is no longer conservative, but aligned with the worst and lowest elements on the right wing.