Conservative Amazons

1. Find my first career-type job

2. Blog every day

3. Make fun of more obnoxious and/or nutty people.  And broaden my scope to include crazies who don’t support Ron Paul.

4. Take horseback-riding lessons

Well, looks like I’m all out of space here.  Guess the resolutions to lose ten pounds, or get up earlier, or shave my legs more often will just have to wait for some other time.

I’ve been told that it isn’t polite to talk about politics in mixed company, based on the assumption that you don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.  The corollary to this bit of instructions is that if someone else says something political that you disagree with, the appropriate response is to smile and nod.  The problem is that by shutting up when you really want to argue, you encourage the idiots of the world to continue to believe A) that they are not really idiots and B) that their opinions are the uncontested majority.

To hell with good manners, I’m introducing the Amazon rule for political engagement.  Repeat after me:

“I’m not going to be polite just so that you can be wrong and be happy about it.”

If you think your friend/casual acquaintance/second cousin is wrong, don’t hold back just because you don’t want to offend someone.  After all, they weren’t worried about offending you.  And a Conservative Amazon should be willing to give as good as she gets.  At worst, you leave feeling like you’ve lost the argument and come back stronger next time.  At best, you may plant a seed of truth in the rocky, barren soil of a liberal mind (Kind of joking. But not completely).

Still don’t feel like arguing?  Just remember that liberals, if given the opportunity, will squeeze you endlessly for tax dollars.  If that doesn’t get you fighting mad, you just haven’t had a job long enough.

We’ll return with our regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow. Until then, a heart-warming, tear-jerking story to tide you over:

G.I. Saves Iraqi Boy in Long Shot Adoption

If “nice” isn’t the worst compliment in the English language, it ranks at least in the top 5.  “Nice” is how you describe a date with a guy you don’t intend to call back, or that person you met at a party whose last name you don’t remember.  It’s the standard teenage reply when mom asks too many questions about your evening.

Nice is the compliment of last resort.  You don’t want to sound like a bad sport by not saying anything, but you didn’t notice anything worth complimenting, so you say that he/she/it was “nice.”

Was the guy you met intelligent?  Was he a good conversationalist?  Was he funny?  You weren’t impressed enough or aware enough to notice, so you just say he was nice. 

As a compliment, nice is intentionally vague.  It can mean anything, everything or nothing.  And it seems that it’s most often the latter.  It doesn’t convey any real admiration.  Pressed for a description and lacking meaningful information, we throw out “nice” in hopes that we won’t be asked for any clarification.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve used “nice” in place of one of the following:

• “polite but boring,”
• “not overtly mean”
• “inoffensive”
• “agreeable but dumb”
• “bearable”
• “unremarkable”
• “complete waste of time that I don’t want to sound bitter about”

Other uses of nice include the dismissive (Oh, that’s nice dear) and the qualifier (He’s a nice guy, but he gave his girlfriend herpes).  This latter form is used mostly to give the speaker the appearance of evenhandedness, regardless of the information revealed in the second clause.

So, to paraphrase Thumper’s mother:  If you can’t say something other than nice, don’t say anything at all.

If you’re looking for a great gift for the conservative women in your life, the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute is here to help, with their fabulous new Damsels in Success 2008 Calender.   From their website:

Imagine waiting in a supermarket checkout line, and instead of seeing all those tacky liberal women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour, you see Smart, the magazine for the sharp, intellectual—and fashion conscious—conservative woman.

Instead of, say, Paris Hilton gracing the cover in all her vacant glory, you see Star Parker or Michelle Malkin modeling the latest professional styles. And rather than being bombarded with teasers like “50 ways to make him want you,” your eyes are drawn to “10 policy positions that will make him crazy.”

That would be worth your four dollars.

The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute doesn’t publish a magazine—yet. But we are proud to present to you our 4th annual Great American Conservative Women Calendar. It features smart, beautiful women we send to college campuses every year to impact the lives of young women.

College students can get a free copy of the calendar by emailing Kathleen McCann your request and mailing address at kmccann@cblpi.org, or calling her at 888-891-4288.  Everybody else can get a copy of the calender for a suggested donation of $25.  Since you waited so freakin’ long to order a copy, you probably won’t get it by Christmas, but it also makes a fantastic New Year/new semester gift. 

If you don’t have any conservative women in your life, I suggest you go out and find yourself some, because you don’t know what you’re missing.

This would also be a great New Year’s gift for any guys in your life with crushes on Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, or your local women’s studies department (perhaps with a note attached explaining that you think it’s a good idea to promote conservative women leaders as well as liberal ones).

Another great gift (especially for your moderate-leaning Republican friends) is a copy of Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed.  I have a huge intellectual crush on Thomas Sowell and this book is one of his best, because he lays out the formula through which the Left manufactures crises and foists “solutions” on the public. 

For less intellectual types, I suggest the classic “Commies Aren’t Cool” t-shirt.  My boyfriend got one for my little brother as a birthday present, and it was a huge hit.

More ideas?  Add them in the comments section.

Anyone looking for another reason to dislike Mike (other than his economic liberalism, ethics violations and taste for freeing rapists) would do well to read what he has to say about foreign policy:

The United States, as the world’s only superpower, is less vulnerable to military defeat. But it is more vulnerable to the animosity of other countries. Much like a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved. But if it attempts to dominate others, it is despised.

Now I understand!  All these years, I’ve been trying to interpret foreign policy as a series of complex interactions based on economic, moral and political considerations.  If only I’d realized before that the world functions just like high school, and all we need to do to stop the rest of the world from disliking us is quit showing off.

Here’s how I see this working:

We’ll make friends with Iran, the lonely, rebellious outcast kid, by just including him a little more in the cool stuff we do, like having nuclear weapons.  And we have to stop calling him mean names like “axis of evil” and administering wedgies to all of his friends (Iraq and Afghanistan). Once he realizes that we really do respect him, he’ll stop acting out.   Once France sees how nice we are to Iran, she’ll finally stop looking down on us and maybe let us tutor her in economics.

And just like in the Breakfast Club, by the end of Mike Huckabee’s presidential years, the world will have discovered that “we’re really not so different after all:”

Color me unsurprised. I actually have to give the Washington Post credit for a well-written story on earmarks. They are unbiased in their treatment of earmarks in general, and give both critics and lawmakers space to defend their positions, but definitely dig into some of the problems inherent in the bloated appropriations bills we’re seeing coming out of Congress. In this case, the focus is on House Majority Leader Steyn Hoyer (D-MD), who was an advocate of the earmark transparency reforms but who managed to get $96 million worth of pork in next years federal budget.

The Post covers the ethical and transparency issues of earmarks, using one of Hoyer’s as an example:

Consider the $450,000 that Hoyer inserted into a 2008 education spending bill for the California-based InTune Foundation Group, whose Web site describes it as a music-education nonprofit group.

In 2005, InTune got a previous earmark for nearly $500,000 to develop lesson plans on funk music and Nobel Peace laureates. Asked recently how effective that program had been, Education Department officials said they didn’t know. InTune hadn’t turned in a report on what it did, officials said.

[...]

That wasn’t the only issue involving the foundation’s performance. In its paperwork for the earmark, InTune said it would use some of the money to hire an educator, Joan Kozlovsky, to evaluate its program in 2005 and 2006. But Kozlovsky, a former school superintendent in St. Mary’s County, said in an interview that she did no such work and hadn’t heard from InTune in years.

The Post reached Eugene C. Maillard, director of InTune, on his cellphone. He said that the project was carried out, although it suffered delays because its senior consultant became ill. He said Kozlovsky is “part of the team that we want to use” to do the final report.

[...]

Maillard, his current and past In Tune associates and their families contributed at least $31,000 to Hoyer’s political action committee from 2004 to 2006, Federal Election Commission records show.

With thousands of earmarks tied to each appropriations bill, there is no way for the Appropriations Committee to evaluate all of the requests, which means that a lot of the earmarks that come through aren’t going to have undergone the kind of scrutiny that taxpayers deserve.

While earmarks account for only a minuscule proportion of overall federal spending, there are symptomatic of what I believe is a bigger philosophical battle.  The question is not whether all earmarks are wasteful, or whether all earmarks are the result of an ethically bankrupt process, but whether our representatives ought to be engaged in this kind of spending at all.  The citizens of a community may well decide that they need a new music program for teens, or abstinence-only sex education program, or teapot museum.  But why should we drain resources from taxpayers in Arlington, Virginia, to pay for a very narrow benefit to a few people in Sparta, South Carolina.  Why should I pay my taxes in Charleston so that a school in Pennsylvania can add some new sex ed programs?

In such a redistributive game, there are going to be winners and losers.  As we’ve seen, the biggest winners tend to be those with political clout rather than those with the greatest merit or need.

…How extraordinarily happy I am to not be stuck in South Bend still?  I was there this weekend for a wedding, which was tons of fun but also incredibly cold.  Especially when you’re used to 70 degree weather in December like I am.

To make an interminable story short, I ended up stranded in South Bend overnight when my 5:15 flight to Cincinnati was delayed indefinitely and I missed the last flight from there to Charleston. Luckily, there was another wedding attendee in the airport waiting for the same flight to keep me company and keep me from going crazy. Did I mention that South Bend Regional airport is about the size of a lunchbox, and the only comfort provided for travelers inside the terminal is a quartet of vending machines?  Also luckily, the groom’s parents were still in town, and put me and my fellow stranded guest up in their hotel suite for the night.

So, I escaped before the “clutches of a deep and deadly freeze” could snare me, but just barely.

Are any of us really surprised that Sean Penn is endorsing Dennis Kucinich for 2008?  A brief excerpt from the former’s seemingly endless tirade:

While I’m not a proponent of the Death Penalty, existing law provides that the likes of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice, if found guilty, could have hoods thrown over their heads, their hands bound, facing a 12-man rifle corps executing death by firing squad. And our cowardly democratically dominated House and Senate can barely find one voice willing to propose so much as an impeachment. That one voice of a true American. That one voice of Congressman Dennis Kucinich. This is not going to be a sound bite. Not if I can help it. I’m torn. I’m torn between the conventional wisdom of what we all keep being told is electibility and the idealism that perhaps alone can live up to the challenges of our generation.

It’s only worth reading his whole rant if you also fantasize about executing the President and his Cabinet.  In which case I have to wonder why you’re reading this blog.

As a side note, I think a Kucinich presidency would be really fun.  I predict the creation of a Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs (perhaps headed by Shirley MacLaine), an Oval Office with furniture rearranged to improve the feng shui, and perhaps a National Astrology Adviser to present President Kucinich with his horoscope every morning before he reads his National Security Assessment.

Today’s laughs brought to you by comedian Jeff Dunham and Achmed the Dead Terrorist: