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Volume 27, Issue 10, october 14, 2004

Opinion

Conservatives are more honest with themselves

mugAmanda McManus
Columnist

In case you were wondering, I’m not an old rich white guy. I’m also not, in my opinion, anyway, a backward elitist with straw in my teeth. I’m a woman with strong convictions and high ideals. I’m the typical sheltered classmate you’ve come across in your lifetime but perhaps hesitated to befriend. The one who seeks out a Bible for answers. The one who will remain a virgin until married. In short, I’m a conservative.

As I’ve said, my life until now has been mostly mundane. It wasn’t until college that I experienced situations my more worldly friends probably knew about from birth. It wasn’t until college I realized just how small-minded the world truly was.

t’s a label I know well. Even The Metropolitan writers have publicly mocked my beliefs. They are, it would seem, deplorable. Backward and often simply foolish, selective in what kind of living is acceptable and therefore deserving of the highest level of ridicule.

But in dismissing conservatives as close-minded, liberals seem to have forgotten reality. After all, they consider themselves to be open-minded. Such a lifestyle, they claim, is superior because it’s more loving of our fellow man. Yet at the same moment, they openly attack conservatives.

Truly, hypocrisy at its finest. Or to take it one step further, an accepted form of modern-day bigotry. By the progressive left, not the traditionalist right.

Recently, a popular topic for many was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truths’ seeming vendetta against Presidential candidate John Kerry. Inconceivable, came the protests. Democrat or Republican, who could even fathom demeaning a war hero? Even President Bush had words of support. Notable since Kerry, unlike Bush, regularly attacked his rival in public. Also notable? Douglas Brinkley, Kerry’s official biographer, publicly acknowledging inaccuracy by Kerry and thus concurring with SBVfT information.

But that didn’t matter. Any true American would never grant a listen to such rubbish anyway.

Yet where was the outcry when ads flamed the right? Created for a contest held by popular left Web site MoveOn.org, they likened Bush to Hitler and Bush’s supporters to Nazis.

Although they were denounced, MoveOn.org founder and Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros had already started the ball rolling back in Nov. 2003, telling The Washington Post, “America, under Bush, is a danger to the world . . . When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans . . . My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me.”

All ads were created by groups not associated with either candidate. All had sensation as a priority before facts. But only one was roundly condemned by all.

I never claimed I wasn’t small-minded. In a sense, everyone is. Everyone has standards by which they interpret life. Those standards range from science to religion to Harlequin romance novels.

By choosing what standard to live by, people decide what to accept and what to reject. Conservatives are simply more honest, with themselves and society, as they do so.