Tuesday, October 12, 2010

I Wish I Were a Conservative

There. I admit it. I want to be a conservative. Badly.
Yesterday, I read a story about Carl Paladino, a Tea Party Republican running for governor of New York City. In the article, it was reported that Paladino said some pretty insensitive things about homosexuals, notably, "I don't want them [children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option.”
Don’t get it twisted. Paladino doesn’t want to discriminate. According to him, gays deserve to be treated the same as straight people. He just doesn’t think they should have the same rights. He went on to defend this seemingly contradictory stance, claiming that children raised within heterosexual parent households are "much better off and much more successful" than children raised within homosexual parent households. (Forget about the fact that Mr. Paladino is lecturing us all on morals while simultaneously raising children with both his wife and his mistress. Forget that this is the same man who caught heat after forwarding e-mails that were racist and mysogenistic and, reportedly, included people banging animals. Forget about the fact that there are rumors spreading about Paladino showing up drunk to a burlesque show in a lesbian bar at three in the morning, grabbing a dancer and saying, "Show me your pussy." Forget all that. That's not important right now.)
I don’t know where he got his facts from, but that’s precisely my point. He doesn’t need them. He’s on the right side of the political aisle, and facts are not important. I want that. I want to spew hate and pull facts from thin air. I don’t want to worry about making sense. I want to be a fucking maverick.
But, that’s not all. By the time I read the article this far, I am already wishing that I had been born without the common sense or common decency that makes me a bleeding heart. But Paladino ups the ante: he busts out the coup de grace, the all-inclusive secret weapon of the right. He blames the liberal media for “improperly interpreting” his bullshit. “The press keeps doing Andrew’s work,” he says, referring to his opponent, NYS Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and the media’s (alleged) liberal love affair with him.
How cool is that? All the time I’ve been wasting, constructing well-reasoned arguments and checking facts, when I could’ve just been a conservative and blamed the liberal media the whole time. It’s easy, it saves time, and it stops you from having to do all that pesky thinking that comes with, well, thinking. Blaming the liberal media works for everything. You say something stupid, blame the liberal media for chopping it up into sound bites. You lose a race, blame the liberal media for unfairly supporting your opponent. You literally never have to accept responsibility for anything you do or say, ever. On the flipside, if you happen to win, well then, just chalk one up for Uncle Sam and the real Americans, the underdogs who toppled big government and the liberal elites. Just thinking about it gets me so pumped, I could punch a homo, but in a good way. More like a celebration than a hate crime.