Where Do I Fit In (and CPAC Was, Well, Interesting?)

(bumped up from late night Saturday)

[VIDEOS of Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson are below the fold.] I’m still the same woman who in 2001-2002 foresaw that nothing was going to stop Bush/Cheney from their obsession with attacking Iraq, and opposed the war with all the ferocity I could muster. I wrote constantly against the use of extra-legal and inhumane torture and treatment of detainees who were afforded no rights. I was forever transformed by the writings of Jane Mayer in The New Yorker on the hideous treatment of detainees and the hard work of SANE conservatives to stop the torture. Mayer even took on “24,” a poorly produced and written drama dedicated to proving that torture always works (except on Jack). It staggers my mind that Dick Cheney and Anton Scalia are dedicated to watching this TV drivel!

I voted for Al Gore and John Kerry unenthusiastically in 2000 and 2004, feeling neither woud be great presidents but they’d at least stop the madness of King George and his puppeteer, Diabolical Dick. Yet, the sexist and unethical mistreatment of Hillary Clinton by the Democratic party so changed me — so infuriated me — that I can never again be a “good” Democrat.

[ED NOTE: THIS NEXT SENTENCE is corrected to show that there is NO common sense in voting straight party ticket. Late night sleepiness prevented careful editing by writer!]

Rationally, there’s NO, NONE, NADA! common sense of purely voting party ticket, so while I didn’t like it, I voted for John McCain (easily enough done in my state where Obama had the election sewn up). But I also voted for all Democrats, except the Republican Secretary of State who is so good, so ethical, so fair, that he was endorsed by the Progressive Democratic group over his Dem opponent. But I am in NO way a Republican, nor do I agree with most Republican viewpoints. There’s so much more I could say about this, but let’s leave that for the comments section, while I tell you the wildest story of what happened to me the other day.

I have two bumper stickers on my car. One, purchased at a beautiful Northwest art gallery, says “Art Saves Lives.” The other says, “Protect Salmon” (a view shared by people of all political stripes).

A purple-faced man pulled up alongside me the other day, and screamed at me, “How do you like your liberal party now? You baby killers?” Stunned that he could ascertain that I am a liberal baby killer from two bumper stickers about art and salmon, I shouted back, “I voted for John McCain!!!!” He smirked. He didn’t believe me. Well, you know what, I almost didn’t believe it myself. I take no great pride in having voted for a Republican who long ago cast aside his appealing independence of thought and action, and caved in on every issue, purely so he could win. In honesty, my vote was a protest, not an endorsement.

So I look at the speeches given at the CPAC conference this past week, and it reinforces my sense that I want as little to do with the “base” of the Republicans as I do with the “base” of the Democrats and their Kossack hard-liner leftist crowd.

These Rush Limbaugh snippets BELOW reinforce my views. I cannot stomach a man who roots for disaster over the bodies of the growing masses of unemployed, uninsured, under-fed and increasingly homeless. I REFUSE to get in bed with the likes of those who uproariously applauded Limbaugh’s anti-gay remarks. I am appalled that the crowd gave Tucker Carlson hell for refusing to bash everything to do with the New York Times, Tucker being a truly decent and very bright man (I learned that from a hard-core liberal who knows him very well and admires him immensely, depsite their political differences). Now, the videos:

If you’d like to watch more CPAC videos, go here.

Where do I fit in? I still don’t know. But I do know that it’s not with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, skeletal Ann Coulter and the simpleton Sean Hannity. Tucker Carlson? Joe Scarborough? Yes. But I’m still sitting on the outside of all of politics, waiting and watching — watching very closely — to see what these parties and their leaders do and how they behave.

If Hillary and Blill Clinton hadn’t been driven over by the bus of the Obama machine, I’d have a home with the Democratic party. But these days I’ll wait.