The Purity of Fools

The Purity of Fools

       Are Conservatives simply more intelligent than liberals?  Is that it? Otherwise how do we account for liberals, like characters in a Three Stooges movie, stepping in the same mud hole again and again then wondering why their cloths are stained. Let me be specific. Al Gore lost Florida and the 2000 presidential race because 90,000 liberals, not finding him pure enough, voted for Ralph Nader who had no chance at all of winning, thereby giving us George W. Bush, the Iraq war, a bad economy, and a retrograde Supreme Court appointee who has savaged liberal causes.

     Fast forward to 2016. Hillary loses Michigan by 11,000 votes, but 51,000 liberals, not finding Hillary pure enough, voted for the Green Party. On the other side, conservatives sucked it up, delivering only 30,000 votes to candidates who might have been more to their ideological tastes but who had no chance of winning.

     The same held true in Pennsylvania. Only a small number of conservative voters deserted Trump for candidates to his right while 50,000 liberals, not finding Hillary pure enough, voted Green, thereby delivering the presidency to a man whose Environmental Protection Agency Secretary, less than a week in office, denies that carbon dioxide emissions effect the climate. Again the purists have stepped in it, but this time none of us may be able to wash the mud off. Once the average global temperature rises as a consequence of environmental negligence it cannot be gotten down again. Once, a retrograde Supreme Court nominee tips the balance against a woman’s right to choose it will not be coming back anytime soon.

     The purity of fools has brought us to a bad place, but with any luck, the game will be played again, in 2018, and beyond. Let us learn from out conservative brethren. It is the final score that counts.