Happy conservative Mary Katharine Ham.

This stuck in my craw the other day. Hotair’s MKH thought fit to lecture the rest of us about how we should feel regarding the progressive opposition.

Many of you will likely disagree with Andrew WK and my lauding of his philosophy, but I loathe the idea of a world where my every relationship and every decision is governed by adherence to my political ideology. I want to be friends with people of all stripes and see whatever movie and eat whatever pasta I feel like without running each of them through a political rubric. Not everything that is not of my political sensibility must deeply offend my sensibilities. One of the reasons I’m conservative is because if you increase without end the number of areas in which the federal government meddles from afar, the more politics infects every corner of our lives. And, frankly, that’s a drab life. I recognize the irony that I somewhat inadvertently made politics my life in an attempt to rid our lives of them as much as possible. But, these days, I figure it’s my public service and the service of my fellow political junkies to pay attention to this all the time so others may be spared.

I object. The left is assaulting every traditional value in the United States. The republic and its constitution are being actively targeted for replacement by a voracious totalitarian state. Every single aspect of life, from the names of sports teams to the casting of TV sitcoms to the content of church sermons and the freedom of expression of people who oppose the administration, is being assaulted by federal agencies ranging from the DOJ to the IRS and EPA. All of which have, suddenly, their own SWAT teams.

Sorry, Mary. [Smile]. Hate to break it to you. I don’t want to be friends with anyone who endorses or apologizes for these developments. Because I know there’s something seriously wrong with them. They are stupid, sick, or evil. [Smile].

I’ll give you just three citations, though I could go on forever. The first has to do with the stupid ones.

Remember that liberals are the ones who are always claiming to have superior powers of empathy and tolerance — and a more sophisticated sense of science, which has shown us that conservatives are actually the ones who are better at seeing things from the other guy’s point of view. An experiment by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (sometimes called “an ideological Turing test”) asked liberals and conservatives to put themselves in the other guy’s socks for the duration of a test and ask them: How would your ideological opponent answer?

Conservatives were far better than liberals at this game, though that should have been easy to guess. When a conservative goes to the movies, picks up nearly any newspaper or watches TV news on any channel but one, he gets the liberal point of view. Liberals, especially in a place like New York, can easily seal themselves off from principled conservative thinking and many choose to do so. A result is that they haven’t a clue how conservatives think.

Liberals also kid themselves that they’re better at arguing than conservatives, but calling your opponent crazy is an appeal to emotion, not reason. It’s also a lazy schoolyard taunt, and it fails an elementary rule of debate, the prohibition of ad hominem remarks.

Stupid? Of course. Then there’s sick. Which is the land of impossible contradictions.

…how can liberals have such hate for this tiny, wonderful democracy of Israel. They’re supposed to be liberals — they have women’s rights, they have gay rights, they have freedom of the press, freedom of speech — and they hate this nation like no other nation on earth.

And they look at the Palestinians, and the Islamists, and the Arabs in general — not the Arabs in general, mostly the Islamists — and they see them as the victims. How can it be? How can they report… why do they do this? It’s because if you start out saying that the Arabs and the Israelis are equally good cultures, if you start out saying, as they must, these reporters must start out with the notion, that the Jews and the Palestinians both want peace. After all, the Palestinians would be a bad culture if they didn’t want peace. So, they’re not allowed to think that. That just might be their prejudices.

So they must start with the conclusion that both sides want peace. Then why are the Palestinians doing such horrible things? Why are they blowing up buses in Israel? It has to be… it can’t be their culture… so it has to be something the Jews did to provoke them. Now they will look through and cherry pick, and spin, and manipulate, oh wait, didn’t a Jew build a house in Jerusalem three weeks ago? Oh, that must be… and that becomes the salient part of the story.

And the more heinous the attack, the more evil the provocation must have been. Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. That’s what the liberal believes. That if you eliminate discriminating thought, you’ll eliminate things to disagree about. We won’t fight, we won’t kill each other, we won’t scream and yell, we won’t hurt each other. If you eliminate thinking, they’re going to have this Paradise, this Kindergarden of Eden.

Adults who think, like Barack Obama and Ron Paul (et fils) that if we don’t hurt their feelings, they won’t want to kill us. Ramses the Second knew better than that four millennia ago. Sickness.

And then there’s evil. Who connives at the misrepresentation of reality for the purpose of enhancing their own power, prestige, and privilege? People who don’t care about anything but their place in the pantheon of plutocrats. The press has become evil.

On March 24, 2008, another kind of scandal struck. All three broadcast networks covered the news that Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Somehow in the who-what-where reportage there wasn’t room for any of them to insert the word “Democrat.” On August 7, Hizzoner was sent to jail for violating the terms of his bond. More national coverage. Still no party affiliation from either ABC or NBC.

Republicans don’t fare as easily with the news of their felony charges. Four months after Mayor Kilpatrick was indicted, so too was Alaska senator Ted Stevens, allegedly for failing to report gifts. All three broadcast networks covered the story. Amazingly, they used identical language to describe him as “the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate.” Three months later (October 27, 2008), during the waning days of the election campaign, Stevens was convicted. Every network covered the story, and every network labeled him a Republican.

Compare that to Rod Blagojevich, the bizarre, loud-mouthed and foul-mouthed former governor of Illinois. He relished the klieg lights and seemingly was everywhere (until he landed at a more permanent address: prison). “Blago” was removed as governor on January 29, 2009, after being arrested and charged with corruption. ABC, CBS, and NBC gave major consideration to the story yet somehow managed not to inform their viewers that he was a Democrat. Blagojevich was convicted in June of 2011, and it happened again: major coverage by ABC, CBS, and NBC, with absolutely no Democratic label in sight.

So too former U.S. representative William Jefferson of Louisiana. On August 5, 2009, he was found guilty on charges of bribery, racketeering, and wire fraud. ABC and NBC covered the story on their evening newscasts, but only ABC labeled him a Democrat. CBS Evening News ignored the story altogether. The following morning all three filed stories. ABC and CBS ignored his party affiliation.

We’ve gone past the point of jovial political disagreements. Mary Katharine Ham, bless her heart, is having a career in the media. She may wish not to see that she’s swimming in evil. But she is. And it will take her down as it is taking all of us down. No Pollyanna feelgood psychobabble is going to change that.

Our country is under assault. I will not shake hands with or speak nicely to anyone who identifies himself with this stupid, sick, AND evil location in the political landscape. [Smile].

Oh goody. I’m Mary Katharine. I’m a conservative and I play nice. [Smile] [grrrr]