Thursday, April 24, 2003

I'm Not an Ugly Duckling, I'm a Goose

Maybe it's just me, but I keep getting pushed farther and farther to the Left in the blogosphere. I started out thinking I was a conservative, but from what I can tell about the ones that call themselves conservatives, I know I'm not one of them. For instance, I don't think you're my mortal enemy if you don't agree with me, nor do I think you're unpatriotic just because you were against the war and don't particularly care for the President or his policies. We can still talk.

I start getting nervous when you equate Bush with Hitler, Jews with Nazis, Israel with Germany, etc. Listen, if I lived in Israel, I doubt that I would have voted for Ariel Sharon. That does not make me hate Jews or Israel. If you want to criticize Israel, fine, go ahead. If you give the Palestinians a free ride when you do criticize Israel, I'm not going to take your comments seriously, and we're probably going to get into an argument. That was what happened that pushed me towards the Right in the first place. Well, that and the fact that I was (and am, still) ambivalent about the war in Iraq. Saddam was a lowlife animal that needed to be removed. Since we created him in large part, I didn't think it wrong that we eliminated him. That ambivalence sure put me in bed with some strange fellows. I feel like the guy who wakes up after a night of heavy partying to discover himself in bed with a whore that's so ugly, that all I want to do is chew my arm off and escape before she wakes up. Okay, having said all that, meet the new addition to my blog role Bill, over at IndustrialBlog. I do invite you by to read Bill's observations about the world around us. I can't tell you a lot about Bill, but I can tell you that he has sincerity in his writing and in his approach to politics and the world in which we live. He also quotes from the Book of Common Prayer is a previous post, which suggests to me that he may be a co-religious of mine. It doesn't mean much, but it does give us a shared frame of reference. Go read Bill.