me dislikey

i shouldn't do this.

it falls into the same category as drunk-dialing and angry-emailing and, oh-i-don't-know, searching for mitt romney's soul.

i shouldn't post while sleep deprived. nothing good can come of it.

therefore i will do it anyway, because my judgment is impaired.

***********

have you seen this? it popped up on my facebook page recently (originally posted by someone called "being conservative," which is a terrible name...what were his parents thinking?).

wow. you're dumb.

at that time the image had over 600,000 "likes" associated with it. i have to assume it has even more now, since several days have passed and there have been no reports of "conservatives" abandoning the internet en masse.

certainly they have reason not to "like" the internet. its existence makes it so easy to share stories about interesting people in strange places (or strange people in interesting places), like todd akin from missouri and frank szabo up in new hampshire and judge tom head from the great state of texas.

go ahead, read their stories. those are some wacky conservative guys "being conservative"!

but we stray from the all-important and heretofore unannounced points of order. which are really just casual observations anyone might make, about anything, anywhere. these points, however, are about the photo above and its terribly clever caption.

 

point of order #1: this bit of rhetoric is not the conservative viewpoint. the conservative viewpoint would be, "i pay for a social safety net as a hedge against being thrown out of work or disabled or some other random act of unkindness. the universe is full of unpredictability, so this preparation makes good, conservative sense. but you want me to take a drug test to use the safety net i helped pay for? no. or, put another way: you'll get my urine sample when you pry it from my cold, wet fingers."

 

see? "being conservative" is complicated!

point of order #2: who forced you to take the urine test referenced above? hint: no one. you willingly submitted your pee for the privilege of supporting someone else's lavish lifestyle and early retirement. yay! if you're upset about this insult to your integrity and personal liberty, please redirect your anger at corporate employers that treat you as suspect and potentially criminal as a condition of employment.

no one said "being conservative" was easy!

point of order #3: a massive drug testing program is unconservative in that it doesn't make economic sense. given the number of long-term unemployed in this country, testing them all presupposes a huge new government bureaucracy spending countless billions of dollars to save a pittance paid to people who are down so low that they can't help but fritter away their pitiful weekly "welfare check" on illegal drugs.

have you seen photos of meth addicts? do they look like they're out on a golf course somewhere drinking champagne and laughing in a harvard accent? hint: no, they look like they're ready to donate their bodies to the nearest cadaver lab.

no one said "being conservative" is actually conservative!

spiteful sidebar: if you're going to propose spending new billions on the unemployed, why not slap electronic bracelets on them so we can monitor their every move?  that, of course, presupposes billions more spending on welfare/urinalysis enforcement squads (think halliburton and blackwater/xe/academi. tagline: try to buy drugs now, poverty-stricken scum!).

liberal alert: or we could spend that money on mental health services and job training and actually putting people back to work.

useful factoid: in florida, where they've actually implemented a drug-test-for-welfare program, they discovered that just 2.6% of welfare recipients tested positive for illegal drugs. compared to 8.1% of the general population. go figure.

to sum up, corporations buy our elections and our politicians to rig the future in their favor, while we squabble like hens over barnyard scraps. we're informed we can't afford teachers or firefighters or cops, but authoritarian government and corporate welfare are okie-dokie.

"being conservative." hmm...i don't think that means what you think it means.