Zilfworks

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Friday, November 05, 2004

Who's Evil?

According to Frank Pastore's opinion piece in the LA Times today ("Christian Conservatives Must Not Compromise") liberalism is an "evil ideology."

And then he actually goes on to criticize liberals for generalizing about and maligning conservatives.

I've been waiting for conservatives to use the word "evil" to describe liberals for some time, and now here it is in black and white.

One of my biggest fears as the election results rolled in was that Bush and the rest of conservative America would wield his slimmest of victories as an unassailable mandate to plow full steam ahead with whatever strikes their fancy, the rest of the world be damned.

And from the conservative gloating I'm seeing now, it's all coming true. Pastore's piece is just one of the more extreme examples of what seems to be a dramatic increase in conservatives' boldness in revealing their true feelings about viewpoints different from their own. And the hatred they reveal for those differences is not attractive.

But conservative gloaters would be wise to remember that instead of a big hammer that can crush anything in its wake, their current popularity is much more likely a pendulum that can and inevitably will swing back in the other direction at some point.

Someone on a discussion list I subscribe to said today that liberals should take a look at the red vs. blue areas on the US election maps, noting how much red there is and how little blue (which is limited to the "high population" zones on the coasts and in the upper midwest). But geography doesn't vote. People do. Empty farmland in Nebraska isn't conservative or liberal. But people are. And those small, blue, "high population" zones are full of people. In fact, very nearly as many people live in those small blue areas as in that vast red area.

So don't think that vast red blanket smothers or even signifies much of anything.

We liberals are still here. There are a lot of us. And we're not at all evil. But we are pissed off...and getting more and more so.

posted by Elizabeth 3:47 PM

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