b Papa Dog's Blog: A Voice from the Right

Papa Dog's Blog

A Thing Wherein I Infrequently Write Some Stuff

Thursday, November 04, 2004

A Voice from the Right

Big day on the old faversham. Somewhat against my better judgment, I spammed a link to yesterday’s rant out to pretty much my entire address book, and was rewarded with an overwhelmingly positive response and the heaviest traffic since I put the hit counter on.

Only two of the respondents were Republicans, and I guess that’s a big part of the problem we face – not knowing the enemy. Only two of the people I’ve corresponded with since starting to accumulate that address book see things differently enough to identify with the 59 million or so (plus or minus the result of touch screen shenanigans) who voted to elect the shrub. That’s what makes a turn of events as ugly as Tuesday night so baffling for the likes of me. Everyone I know sees the same thing I do when watching Geo. Bush flap his gums on the news: a smug, arrogant, lying scumbag backed by a bizarre coalition of robber barons and soldiers of Christ. One knows there are ardent Bush supporters out there – one hears about them in the news like, say a newly discovered moon of Saturn. But it seems somehow that a newly discovered moon of Saturn is more likely to be observed strolling along College Avenue than is an ardent Bush supporter. It’s difficult to anticipate the moves of such an alien species.

Well, okay, so maybe that’s job one. Get to know the other side. Of the two right-leaning folk who replied to my spam, only one of them was an actual Bush supporter, and strangely he’s neither a homophobic evangelical loon nor the CEO of an energy concern. I kind of wondered if I might receive a response from him like the one I got. I seemed to recall he was of rather a libertarian bent, and while that hardly makes a natural fit with an administration dedicated to the speedy dismantling of civil liberties, I was pretty sure he sat further to the right on the political spectrum than most of the other spammees. He was kind enough to expand my audience by excerpting part of my post on his blog – surrounded, of course, by a patronising post of his own wherein he accused me of being patronising, but hey, what’re ya gonna do? – and included a link to the full post. Least I can do is return the favour. He’s a good guy, though of course completely wrongheaded (clearly he believes a lot of what he reads in the right-wing press). These few paragraphs are all the recreational writing I have time for tonight, but I’ll be sending him a reply sometime this weekend, and we’ll see where things go from there.

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