Friday, September 07, 2007

The Death of Conservatism

Richard Belzer on Huffington Post


Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679)


The heartless, spiritually bankrupt intellectual frauds who openly court -- and are disturbingly non-judgmental of -- the most intolerant loathsome elements of the political landscape (who, for some unconscionable reason, have been consulted about virtually everything our government has been doing or undoing for the past six plus agonizing years) -- these are the fruits of a particular strain of conservative ideologues with a shared affinity for the Hobbesian view of humanity, which postulates that people are essentially evil and the role of the ruling class, the government, was to have a standing army and police presence and little else. Essentially that the "people" were totally on their own, frontier-style with no public services, health care, college grants, head start, maintenance of roads and bridges, public defenders, job training programs, Medicare, Medicaid; you get the picture.

Also violently opposed to the Jeffersonian assertion that people were basically good and part of a government's function is to engender the conditions where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are possible through education, hard work and a sense of community, whereas conservatives have only contempt for the notion of a fair playing field.

Conservatism is in its last throes if you will, twisting in the wind, dying like communism did because neither philosophy works by definition -- they both operate from the fraudulent premise built around contempt for and control of the people.

The rest of the piece is here ...



All I can say is that it sounds like there's an echo in here.

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