"WE WERE RIGHT"

"The list is endless. Over and over again, we were right, and they were wrong. So, who are these people? They’re called conservatives, and on their best days they’re just wrong. More often they’re mercenary kleptocrats whose one skill is that they’re well practiced at the fine arts of deception.

Anyone shocked to find out that so-called conservatives (actually, ‘regressives’ is nowadays the more accurate appellation) are wrong about just about everything hasn’t been doing their homework for history class, and should consider staying after school. Conservatives have almost always been wrong, almost always on the wrong side of
history. When the Founders were mutually pledging their lives, fortunes and their sacred honor to each other and to their cause in the eighteenth century, Tories took the side of colonialism and monarchism. When nineteenth century progressives fought for the ‘radical’ notion of abolishing slavery, conservatives led the opposition. In the twentieth century the record of failure ranges from women’s suffrage, to civil rights for blacks against which they staged the longest filibuster in Senate history, Native Americans, women and now gays, to environmentalism, civil liberties protections, McCarthyism, Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, massive federal debt and more. Nor have they done better on foreign policy questions, either. While Hitler was amassing power in Europe, conservatives forced American isolationism, creating a powerful adversary who only had to be faced down in more lethal form later. These are also the same folks who brought us Vietnam and the present war in Iraq, not to mention the toppling of democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and beyond, US-sponsored terrorism in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and winks and nods for apartheid in South Africa. And no, my Kool-Aid inebriated friends, Ronald Reagan did not ‘win’ the Cold War. However stunning his heroic victory in Grenada, the Soviets were neither wowed nor spent into submission – though we may yet be.

Quite a stellar record, eh? Indeed, what I don’t get about conservatives – always so big on honor and morality – is why they don’t do the ‘right thing’ and... well, at least shut up. If I was that wrong, that often, I sure as hell would."