Conservative Ideology and those emails ...

Graphic by Larry Ray

If you occasionally or even regularly receive odious forwarded emails from right wing Conservatives, Tea Party types (and that could include some of our own relatives) you might fire off a reply email debunking the bilge in these emails. But after reviewing the concise overview of conservative ideology, below, it may be easier for you to just hit the delete button for these emails instead of trying to reply with logic and reason.

I have a close friend who has worked hard and who has done extremely well for himself and his family. His deep seated genuine sense of charity and fair play for his fellow man causes him to continue to react and reply to the hateful, selfish and certainly racist emails forwarded to him by his early classmates who are now also very well off old friends.

The emails come largely from white men who are now independently wealthy. Most are now retired physicians, bankers, attorneys and such. My friend tries to reply to them with documented facts that refute, point-by-point, the foul, dubious and appalling warnings and claims in the forwarded emails he receives.

His earnest efforts to change their minds seems only to increase the volume of right-wing conservative emails he receives. 

My many entreaties for him to just stop acknowledging their selfish and loathsome emails were reinforced a few days ago by another of his friends, a down to earth man who is a moderate liberal, rancher, philanthropist and early Silicon Valley entrepreneur. 

He told my friend the same thing I have been telling him, but much more forcefully, by penning the brief outline below of the bare ugly truth about ingrained Conservative zealotry:

The ideology and logic that Conservatives cannot get past . . . 

There will always be poor people. So, there is really nothing you can do about that. So, just let people make their stupid decisions, and even die as a result. They deserve it. You can't do anything about it, anyway. So, just relay tasteless jokes over the Internet instead. I mean, why worry? People are inherently sinners, it's human nature, and therefore individuals are untrustworthy, lazy and gaming any system you throw at them. So, one should put trust into corporations, which are superior to individuals because they have boards that balance out the evil individuals - even if that corporation produces drugs that kill teenagers, spills oil into our environment, kills miners, steals money from Main Street, etc. Why? Because in the end, corporations are more trustworthy than individuals, who in the end are our elected individuals in a democracy, and who, by conservative definition, are individuals who are sinners all and simply can't be trusted. In fact, they need a Judeo-Christian ethic to overcome their unstable human nature. Ergo, you can't trust government, which is made up of individuals who all game the system. So, it' a better bet to have our children and environment in the palm of the profit machines than in the hands of elected officials, who might try to regulate the dangers of those corporations... 

This bare-bones description, certainly a bit of hyperbole and grim humor, nonetheless pretty well nails the historic greed and arrogant assumptions of the Conservative core of the GOP. That Americans are being asked to vote for this bunch of robber barons once again so soon after the eight disastrous years of GOP control in the White House from which we are still trying to recover is truly amazing. 

Also amazing is that so many angry and fearful Americans are just plain dumb as chickens. They feel that voting for Mitt Romney will make things better for them. And, indeed, Romney's hollow and ever changing positions and promises are just so much cracked corn chicken feed. 

Better to just hit the delete button on those far right emails. Remember, "If you are in an argument with a fool, make sure he is not similarly occupied." 

It's also a good idea to hit the delete button for Republican candidates on your ballot as we vote this November. President Obama has a lot more of the GOP's greedy, tangled mess left by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney to clean up.