It's Easy to Spot a Fake Conservative

By Roger F. Gay

If you're paying the slightest bit of attention, you've heard it or read it, and probably both. Support Mitt Romney because Barack Obama is bad, mmkay! If you've been reading my articles, you're also aware of my occasional nagging about the “lesser of two evils” con. I'm not the only one nagging about it either. It's all part of the new awakening. People are jumping on the “I'm Not Stupid” bandwagon. We're not going to fall for it.

Mitt Romney shows us what may be the closest example of a pure negative campaign strategy. Slip into debate and analysis of his record and character and there isn't a dime's worth of difference between this wanna-be R candidate and the D rival. He lies about it of course. What's important is to create enough distraction so that there's just too little time questioning and challenging his lies. His opposition will question them, but hey – who's going to believe them?

His best strategy does not include encouraging any detailed examination of his politics. In fact, his only reasonable strategy is “Obama is bad, mmkay! Don't vote for Obama. Obama is bad!” Then hope there are enough people who don't pay much attention who will think that R is their only alternative and no matter who the candidate is, imagine he might be better. There will of course be many. The question is whether there would be “enough”. In Romney's case, it is quite doubtful that there would be, but that's not the subject of this article.

Blindly throwing out the known bad guy is a time honored tradition. Can't get worse, right? Of course it can. I used to think this way myself. Turns out that it can get worse and it does get worse, and then it gets worse some more before getting much worse. Not everybody knows that, apparently. Pure negative campaigning wouldn't work at all if they did. We'd all be asking, “What makes you better?” and not letting the details fly over our heads. We'd yank them down and subject them to reality checks. Big Media wouldn't get away with slipping them past us or ignoring details altogether. They'd either do a proper job or we wouldn't tune in.

Let us imagine, just for the sake of argument, that Romney is in some way or another slightly better than Obama. Heck; we can even imagine that he's better than “slightly better.” It's still extremely simple to know that Mitt Romney is not a conservative and that his supporters know it. For example, both Obama and Romney are for national socialized medicine. Romney claims his approach to it is better than Obama's. It's not. When the details are subjected to a reality check, it's obvious they're the same. How could they not be? It's national socialized medicine no matter how you spin it. But that's not the subject of this article.

“Somewhat better”? Last time I actually used my brain to consider that idea, it seemed quite relative. Isn't that an obvious give-away? Conservatives believe in absolutes. Sure, some things are relative. $100 trillion is more than $100 billion. But conservatives still know that $100 billion is a lot of money even when it's compared to a larger amount. And even conservatives-light understand that when you spend $100 billion here and $100 billion there; pretty soon it adds up!

Real conservatives can and do come to grips with absolute minimum standards for political candidates. I mean, if you've got two armed men hell-bent on raping and pillaging breaking into your home, one at the front door and one at the back, you don't waste time wondering which one might pretend to respect you in the morning. The right answer is to shoot 'em both.
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