As a Chicago baseball fan I have known my share of heartache, humiliation, and hope. Notice that I am neither a Cubs or Sox fan, but a Chicago baseball fan. I just love the game and don’t really care who wins; while this is somewhat like proclaiming yourself an agnostic while standing between Torquemada and Cotton Mather* I generally don’t get much grief for it. The thing is, I’m as likely to be at Wrigley as New Comiskey** and as a result I see exactly how both groups of fans feel about each other. When I go to New Comiskey I pass vendors selling as many variations on “Cubs suck” merchandise as they do Sox gear. You are literally as likely to hear someone shout something disparaging about the Cubs as they are to cheer on the Sox. Every third conversation seems to be about how terrible the Cubs, Wrigley Field, and the North Side are in general. Then when I go to Wrigley the only indication that there is another team in town is by looking at the scoreboard that lists all the teams in the National and American Leagues; the rivalry is incredibly one sided in that sense. Even in the year the Sox won the World Series, Sox fans could barely notice because of their all-consuming hatred of the Cubs; when the Cubs won, they had the largest peaceful secular gathering of human beings in history.
Conservatives are a lot like Sox fans; nothing makes them happy because they don’t want to be happy, they just want liberals (or Cubs fans) to be miserable. The closest they come to happiness is gloating in victory while drinking the sweet tears of the vanquished. This is why they’re so angry that “the left” is so energized; we haven’t provided them with nearly enough tears. Somewhere along the line they ceded the moral high ground so that they could embrace depraved and damaged people like Milo Yiannopoulos because he would say terrible things on their behalf. To be clear, although Milo is a hypocrite, it is not for playing the “victim card” and confessing that he is broken person but rather his incapacity to forgive others their brokenness. It should have been clear there was something desperately wrong with him even without knowing what he said regarding pedophilia and yet he was given a massive platform to spew madness and hate because that is what they wanted him to do. Liberals did not make conservatives love Milo.
I suppose that I take comfort that they still have some kind of sense of shame. At least they recognized that it would be better to drop Milo like a dog turd rather than to try and convince people that man on boy pedophilia is just another traditional religious practice that godless liberals were oppressing with our socialist nanny state. While I agree with the leadership of CPAC for recognizing that white supremacists have no place in mainstream political discourse, that does not mean that everyone at CPAC feels that way. From the Washington Post:
Spencer was stopped by JP Sheehan, a CPAC attendee wearing a black-and-gold Make America Great Again baseball cap.
“Praise kek!” said Sheehan, posing for a selfie with Spencer and repeating a meme that had been adopted by the alt-right. “He’s the coolest guy.”***
I am not accusing you of being a racist. I am not wagging my finger to lecture you. I am trying to point out that maybe it’s time to stop trying to piss people like me off or outrage me with how edgy you are and actually consider what it is going to take to effectively govern our great nation. Your current philosophy, my conservative comrades, is as nihilistic and solipsistic as that of a 19 year old suburban virgin who just discovered Ayn Rand. I have never found it easier to argue a conservative into running away like a frightened child; apparently my fellow Americans are demonstrating that to their Republican representatives across the country at the moment. Those are not paid protestors, my friends, those are citizens. All of that phony outrage you ginned up for the past eight years is going to haunt you now because you set a very low bar for behavior with a President who was gentlemanly, sophisticated, and who tried to work with you; now you’ve collaborated with racists and the Russians to put a dangerously incompetent headcase in the Oval Office while tripping over yourselves to dismantle the Federal Government and are scratching your head at the outrage confronting you. You don’t understand where it’s coming from because you don’t see anyone organizing it or paying for it. That’s because it’s actually We the People rising up.
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*That was just for you, Kenny.
**I am never going to refer to it by that stupid name.
***JP Sheehan wouldn’t know what cool was if you put ice cubes in his asshole.