Who need "Ask a Conservative?" TT's got the real deal.

Their beloved fear

The liberals should shut up because they are traitors.

Trans: The liberals should shut up because they use those facts (which, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, have a liberal bias) to try to make us look like we are lying like sacks of shit.

Maybe some sort of handheld device or small ear plugs we could purchase. Perhaps a TV version to install like closed captioning. Instantly translates anything a con says right onthe screen!

Here we go again:

They love it so dear

Their dearly beloved fear.

Liberals need only use their brain. Cons are that transparent.

I can't read the Wingnut columns. Fortunately, TMW does it better and cuts to the chase a lot faster.

The best way to defeat these people is to ignore them. The more attention we pay to their arguments, the more we play on their court. Just state our case in a way that makes them look like the idiots they are.

@walkingmountain -- We did try ignoring them. That's how they got the presidency. That was a pretty long 8 years. Or 28, depending on how you count. I think we've learned that Democracy actually has to be safeguarded.

Remember Bill Maher getting shouted down? Remember when it was just you and Sparky alone in the dark, because nobody else would speak up? It's still not clear to me how that happened, or why we're not demanding reforms to keep it from happening again. How did our public intellectuals end up being such cowards?

The excuses we hear -- that reporters were afraid of being denied access, that entertainers would have their shows canceled -- never held a lot of water for me. I know it's hard to lose your livelihood and public voice, but the government didn't really jail it's media critics, and a lot of these people are living on family money anyway -- that's how they could afford to be entertainers.

There just seemed to be so little courage. Who did we have? Sean Penn? "Team America?"

The funny part is that this is actually less insane than what "The Wingnut" writes every week, and I mean both the clear-eyed conservative statements and their translations here.

Seen another way, it's also another translation basically of what the Wingnut writes each week.

"I'm going to try to explain to you how conservatives think" =

"I'm going to run through a list of talking points from the really extreme right, you know the kind of stuff that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh say all the time, and yet through some combination of tricks of labeling (I'm a "conservative", not an extreme right winger!") and the fact that Salon is always desperate for sensationalist nonsense, I'm getting it published in a "progressive" zine instead of just feeding it to Bill O'Reilly like I used to do for a living."

I realize that the translation has more words than the original, but I turned on "show hidden files" in the translated version.

The past 30 years or so of republican revolution not coincedently have been a golden age in the long decline of the English language. Devilish oxymorons like the famously confounding tag line, "compassionate conservative" represent the public outcroppings of a vast iceburg of deception. To present "free trade" for example as "sensible","fair" or even "patriotic" misconstrues the policies intent while reproducing the conscious denial of impoverishment and war as the direct social results. This corruption of language works to seperate the words used from their meanings. For the conservative movement the concealment of the real intentent of their policies, be it the disenfranchisement of minorities or the advancement of war as a solution to the crisis of overproduction, they have learned to effectively misuse language. Tommorrow's strips imply that an inverted lexicon is being used to decieve, just as George Orwell warned. The real stars of the rightwing campaign against English are Edward Bernays and Joseph Gobbels. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechinism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.", E Bernays from PROPAGANDA pub.1928.

Folks, this cartoon is what a liberal thinks conservatives want. It isn't, we don't want another 9/11. We didn't want the first one! We love liberals. We were all liberals as children!

Conservatives aren't out to kill liberals just change them by persuasive arguments into useful, thinking individuals.

To quote a liberal, "Can't we all just get along?"

Well, we probably could have if you'd shown any interest in getting along back before your movement was so completely discredited and marginalized.

Now you don't have anything to bargain with. Your political philosophy is rightly despised by an ever-increasing percentage of the population, and frankly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people. Enjoy your coming irrelevancy - you earned it.

I refer you to the case of Rubber v. Glue.

If all you are doing is saying "Person X" is a psychopath, I think that's name calling not really satire.

You can call Person X a psychopath, but that accusation is no more true then it is when the same is suggested about Person Y.

It's fine that you think Person X is a psychopath, but don't you think you might want to offer some more evidence of this fact rather than your "translation" of others words?

Again you may want to refer to sticks V. Stones to see how much name calling effects political change.

It's sociopath.

There's a difference.

That's a wonderful sentiment, and a very American one, but liberals are feeling a bit prickly right now after a decade of being called names.

Ironically, I was a conservative to a middle-of-roader when younger, probably the result of reading James Michener's "The Bridge at Andau" in 7th grade. But I was never the type of conservative who shrieked insults at people, I just believed in articulating points and receiving contrary opinions with "Well, yes, but what about....?" Oddly, back then it was liberals who had the reputation of screaming insults at people, such as fascist, racist, war-monger, and just plain "old."

I changed over the years because I was also always an environmental type, concerned about pollution and suburban sprawl that spead people thin to ruin that much more land. When Reagan came to power in the 80s, he had some good generally-stated principles, but didn't really care about the fine details and left the details to a kleptocracy that followed him into office.

The breaking point for me, as a military vet, was when he sold 2,000 antitank missiles and 500 Hawk antiaircraft missiles to Iran and then lied, lied, lied about it. "It was a small quantity of defensive weapons that would have fit in a single room" he said in a televised address. A friend in a reserve unit I was in at the time said "You'll notice he didn't say how big the room was.

After 9/11 I was as horrified as anybody, and favored going into Afghanistan. We'd stated our greivance to them, gave them an ultimatum, and they spurned it with the stupid claim that "Uh, bin Laden has gone missing!" When American forces captured a dumb California kid, I argued that we should withhold judgement - after all, a lot of German-Americans who had visited relatives in Germany in the 30s were drafted into the German army. In response, conservatives call me a traitor, stupid, a traitor, un-American, a traitor, and the ever-popular "faggot!" When I pointed out that the argument for invading Iraq didn't add up, given that their wreck of a country was already under an air blockade and had disarmament teams roaming the country, I received the same arguments/insults back.

P.J. O'Rourke said that the long-hair hippies of the 60s grew up and became Republicans. I think the same thing. The people of the 60s who carried out liberal protest by shouting obscenities in public, throwing rocks and bags with paint in them, and heckling opposing speakers are now the conservatives who have exactly the same lack of regard for opposing viewpoints. Eric Hoffer, in "The True Believer," said radicals of one stripe often swing to the opposite side so they can keep being in the center of a mass movement. So liberals should always stay vigilant against that happening.

Anyway, yes, I'd love it if we could "all get along." But I would have liked it a lot more if Republicans had said that after 9/11, instead of demonizing everybody who wasn't 200% Republican.