Tag: Patriotism

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Do Conservatives Purposefully Set Us Up For Failure?

This is something that I’ve had rolling around in my head for awhile, and obviously if I’m writing on the topic, I think the answer is yes, at least to some extent. To be clear, I don’t think your typical conservative citizen wants their government to fail. I think the majority of citizens at both end of the spectrum mostly want a successful government in place. I’m specifically talking about the conservatives that are running things for their party. There are two statements I’ll kick things off with here. The first comes from popular conservative strategist and lobbyist, Grover Norquist.

“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Grover Norquist,  May 25, 2001

This comes from a man that is behind a lot of government initiatives, runs a super PAC influencing government, and helps conservatives get elected all over the country.

The second is from someone I think will be a pretty common source as I move forward because he’s the epitome of a ruthless, conservative ideologue for whom the ends always justify the means. Shortly after the republicans took control of Congress in the midterms, Mitch McConnell said this:

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

– Mitch McConnell, October 23, 2010

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Patriotism and the NFL

I wasn’t sure I was going to write about this topic, especially so early on in my blog. Part of my reasoning is that it was an older-ish news story and, even though this “scandal” was one of the reasons I decided to start this site, I wanted to try and stay more current. Luckily, I suppose, our president took care of that for me over the long weekend, though:

Another reason is that I don’t know how accurately I can write about this because I don’t personally know what it’s like to be black in the United States. I can’t truly understand what it is to experience racism like they have. I don’t want to come off as obnoxious, disingenuous, or self-righteous trying to explain my understanding of it when you, reading this, don’t know me or my sense of humor very well yet.

Colin Kaepernick
Photo by aukirk / CC BY 2.0

My last reason is that I strongly believe that, while average citizens might truly be angry, the outrage coming from the president and the conservative media pundits is inauthentic. They aren’t truly angry, but they know they can rile up their audience if they pretend they are. It’s largely meant to be a distraction for us in two ways. The first is keeping our minds off of other, more important things, like the CBO’s analysis of the tax bill, for example. The second is to avoid discussing the real issue that these guys are kneeling because of, which is a lot harder than berating them for disrespecting troops and the country that gives them millions of dollars to entertain it. But I find myself wanting to write about that real issue.

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