I Was Walking Through The Blog One Day

Occasionally, I take a walk through Blog World to see what's out there and came across a site entitled "A Conservative's Conservative" published by someone called Eddie. Give him his due, he admits to being a Right-Winger, and he has clearly swallowed every cliche and lie the Republican Party and the Bush cabal push out. His latest is a letter to his, presumably dead, grandparents who came across from Europe and settled in America. I have to say that it is a little purile and sad, and perhaps it might have been wiser to have kept that conversation private. Of course, right wingers tend to wear there heart on their sleeves and will use anybody, including their own Grandparents to make some "political" point.

One thing his site illuminated for me was the thinking behind some of the statements these Conservative's make. He says that he is for Free Speech - except, of course, for Communists, Liberals and Democrats (who he calls Democ(rat)) and anyone else who doesn't agree with him. Free speech is only to be allowed to those who think like him and his friends. Instead of arguement, he uses insult - I presume because there is no coherent philosphy underpinning Republicanism except personal greed (something they don't want to advertise) at the expense of others. As usual with Right Wingers, he pidgeon-holed me as a "Liberal" based on the fact that I made comments about Bush not through asking me, and of course his narrow mind assumed that if I was a Liberal, I couldn't be a Christian.

Jesus is the best Liberal I know! Anti-capital punishment, slow to condem, quick to understand.

If that differentiates me from Right Wingers, then I am proud to be called a Liberal. I personally consider myself an open-thinker and question every-thing before coming to a conclusion. Mostly my tendencies are left of centre, but not always. Here in the UK I feel I can genuinely believe and express an opinion without it being thrown back at me as an insult.

One quality that seems consistent with right wingers the world over is their capacity to hate those that are and think differently to themselves. It's not disagreement, nor dislike, but pure hate. Hate, of couse, is born out of fear, and so right wingers tend to be very frightened people.

He wrote a list of reasons why he was proud of Bush. Fine, but with the best will in the world, I couldn't recognise many of those qualities from view of Bush. Bush is honest - WMD!; has a great sense of humour - as far as I can tell, he can't string 2 sentences together, which is funny; he listen's to people - well he doesn't seem to want to listen to Cindy or any other of the greiving widows and parents of soldiers who have died in his "noble cause"; he has morals - where? and finally doesn't say a bad word about his enemies - "Axis of Evil" springs to mind and "they are all bad people" when talking about the prisoners illegally detained on the base in Cuba. I'm sorry, but Eddie appears to be seriously deluded, brainwashed or is trying to manipulate and catch the eye of those who could help him up the greasy pole of Republican heirarchy.

I was also interesting to read some of the comments on his blog. One person had spent 8 years in the UK and thinks that almost all of us are "commies", brainwashed by the BBC. I suppose he would prefer it if we were brainwashed by Fox "News". Are well, it takes all sorts to make a world, and it's good to know where they are.

The final irony in all this is that I am a republican. The Monarchy is so yesterday!

Today is the first day of the Third Test match against Australia, and England had a great one. All batsmen made runs except Strauss who got an unfortunate one early on. Vaughan, who been in need of a score scored a magnificent 166. At the end of the day England have scored 341 runs for the loss of 5 wickets and Flintoff has yet to bat. Hopefully, we can double this score, or at least add a couple of centuries to it, before letting our bowlers loose. Unfortunatly, I couldn't pull the sickie, but I had the the BBC web score-card open, so was ablt to follow progress.