Conservatives Banking on "Culture of Death" to Perpetuate Their Beloved Culture Wars.

What do you do when your "tried and true" political and social issue loses its efficacy? Cultural conservatives desperately need to bring back the passion they lost when a majority of Americans accepted that abortion was a woman's right.

Sure, abortion will always be "the sexy" anti-choice issue. What's more exciting than promoting policies that get women in trouble and then punishing them for it??

After all, stem cells are boring (and research was again made legal under Obama) and cloning is too sci-fi to get worked up about yet. But euthanasia? You can't pin something as cute as those little foetus feet to your lapel, but you sure can rile up the elderly. Keep our greatest generation squirming by telling them that the world is ending and that their government is going to kill them like Jews in Nazi Germany!? Politically priceless!

It's a stragegy that lets the Republicans unite the little base rumps yet remaining of their party: the social conservatives, the fiscal conservatives, and the neocons. Who cares if it takes some nasty lies, a weak conscience, and moral ineptitude? It's for the supremacy of the Republican Party! (I love it that the nostaligic have to tout Reagan in yet another article in this same issue.) Social conservatives get a new front to shore up the "pro-life" platform; fiscal conservatives get to rail against bureaucracy and "deep debt" of future generations; and the neocons get to hang with the patriot/militia types and their guns, exclaiming American superiority over all other nations.

I know, I know, what would you expect from the pairing of the dramatic, fear- and gloom-mongering Wesley J. Smith and the so-right-we-have-to-question-its-continued-relevancy National Review? I recommend you wait for the article to go online. I refuse to give them my money. But you can get a glimps of what Smith spouts at his blog, secondhandsmoke.

I've been in a pissy mood lately. And I've perhaps without restraint jumped into a few too many spats with friends or relatives of friends about health care reform. "The evil ignorance," I proclaim in my anger and frustration. "But he/she deather/birther/patriot/skinhead/gun carrier/uninformed-independent-voter/rabid-uninformed-conservative-with-an-inkling/deeply-concerned-but-uninformed-faithful really believes what they are saying!" is the reply. And I believe that everyone should be forced to hitch hike across Kenya....

I don't give a fuck what others believe. There are facts in this fight for health care reform. And they don't bode well for those who yell abortion and death, rationing and "freedom."

Until we stop allowing "belief" to cloud fact, we will be allowing desperate, lying or misinformed Republicans to frame all fact - and our future health and prosperity - out of the debate. Call me pissy, cantankerous, irritable or foul-mouthed. I don't care.

We can not afford to be nice any more. Honest, firm, patient, civil, yes. But lies and false "beliefs" have no place here. Someone needs to tell the emperors they have no clothes.