Bed-Wetting Conservatives

I’m tired of Bed-wetting Conservatives.

You know the kind of person I’m talking about.

The "Bed-wetting Conservative" is always fretting Democrats will take over the White House, especially whenever the Republican Caesar is criticized. They’re always saying things like "If you think it’s bad now, it’ll be a lot worse with Nancy Pelosi (or insert Democrat here) in the White House." The bed-wetters consider Democrats in the White House as the worst of all possible nightmares, and virtually wet themselves in fear of that event. And here’s the most important point: they like – and need – to be scared to the level of bed-wetting.

The "bed-wetting conservative" is not really a conservative; he is a concubine of the Republican Party. The bed-wetting conservative, who has predictably had his conservative principles betrayed by the Republican Party with regularity for at least a decade, helps me to understand a variety of societal psychoses, such as why Hillary Clinton keeps taking Bill Clinton back. And the quadrennial return of the District of Columbia beltway paycheck patriots to the GOP fold helps me to understand why the battered wife keeps going back to her abuser.

The bed-wetting conservative frets about Democrats inhabiting the White House even when it is patently untrue that Democrats could make the office worse. Even when the Republican in the White House openly claims the power to lock up any American citizen without explaining why they are being locked up (which is about as tyrannical as it gets), the bed-wetter still stumps for the Republican as the "lesser of two evils." The mathematical equation is such that no matter how far the Republican President moves to the left, he cannot possibly move to the left of the Democrats.

Bed-wetters are the kind of people who rail against our unfaithful allies, like Germany and Italy, who have issued arrest warrants against our CIA agents for kidnapping innocent people off their streets and sending them away for months or years of torture. These allies have "no guts." But if any foreign country were to do the same thing to the United States, the bed-wetter would scream for nothing less than every square millimeter of that country to reach a temperature of nothing less than 10,000,000 degrees Kelvin within 30 minutes and subsequently paved with trinitite.

"Foreigners have no rights," the bed-wetter will openly tell you when foreigners are placed in torture prisons without trial. When American citizens are given the same treatment as the foreigners, the bed-wetter knows they are all guilty of being terrorists – no trial needed. After all, why would the President lock up an innocent person? Even when these same prisoners are later released, the bed-wetter’s faith is untroubled. You can ask him: "If the prisoner was guilty, why did the President let this dangerous person go? And if he was innocent, why did he lock him up in the first place?"

He has a ready reply: "We can’t take chances in this post-9/11 world." (You can always tell when a bed-wetter is out of rational arguments, because it always forces them to resort to referring to the calendar.)

They know how the real world works, because they’ve seen it on the television show "24." They know terrorists are just biding their time by such low-tech distractions as IEDs and car bombs in Iraq. From "24," we should know terrorists really have access to billions of dollars of scientific equipment and laboratories, as well as the advanced microbiologists needed to produce bioweapons. Terrorists also have the ability to summon a cohort of nuclear scientists and all the enriched plutonium needed for nuclear weaponry at a whim. And they know they’ve got thousands of "sleeper" cells placed in the United States. (I’m wondering: Since all these cells have been consistently "sleeping" for at least five years now, shouldn’t we start calling them "coma cells"?)

While most bed-wetters are fans of "24," not all are. Most also attend the neo-con madrasahs on talk radio, including Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin. Sean Hannity is the arch-type bed-wetting conservative. "Hannitized" doesn’t rhyme with "lobotomized" for nothing. Hannity provides the Orwellian two minutes of hate against the enemy of the day, which is always a Democrat.

The talk radio madrasahs like to brag about their burgeoning manhood (which amounts to nothing more than neuticals), and how it helps them to teach the bed-wetters how the world works. To wit:

Only the leadership of the President can save us from this otherwise inevitable nuclear holocaust. Only total, unquestioned power in the hands of the President can save us. Torture is good, they stress, because that’s the only way to get the terrorists. We don’t need trials when we have the President doing the "deciding." And forget about the U.S. Constitution and 2,000 years of Christian just war theory; the President needs unchecked war powers to take the war to the enemy.

Bed-wetters like to have the king’s – I mean, the President’s – party in charge of Congress. But they are really concerned about holding onto the President’s office. And they all share the irrational conceit that their party will always hold onto the throne’s power, even when that control is so obviously overdue for a change. That’s why they are willing to give the president power to lock up anyone without explaining himself to the plebeians. Republicans will always hold the presidency, the Republican president has a good heart and would only lock up the right bad guys. There’s no reason to believe a future Democrat president would ever misuse the total arbitrary dictatorial power they assert for their Republican president. The rest of the world just doesn’t understand: "Duh! If no Democrat ever takes power, then they can’t misuse it!" And if a skeptic were to point out that the party in power historically shifts, the bed-wetter knows that’s the time to rally the skeptic most urgently to the Republican cause!

Bed-wetters believe intuitively that when the President deploys troops abroad that he is as infallible as the Pope when pronouncing Catholic doctrine. No matter how poorly the president deploys troops abroad in wars that continue to make us less safe, they cling to the president because we shall not be safe if he is replaced by a Democrat. Even though the bed-wetter believes the President can’t be wrong and is infallible when placing troops abroad, bed-wetters strangely believe that any doubt by anyone in their social circle about the President’s military engagements hurt the war effort and will lead to defeat. Doubts only embolden the enemy, even when we really don’t know who the enemy is. The President, evidently, draws his infallible power from our unquestioning faith and that infallible power dissipates with any doubt.

The scenario is a bit like the Star Trek episode "The Children Shall Lead," where faith in the Gorgon gave children visitors onto the Starship Enterprise extraordinary powers. But when the children’s faith in the Gorgon was shaken, the Gorgon evaporated. Like that Star Trek episode, any lack of faith in the President is helping the "Alien upon us, the enemy within." Does that sound familiar? Next we’ll expect to hear the bed-wetters summon the president with the following chant: "Hail, hail, fire and snow, call the angel we will go, far away, for to see, friendly angel come to me."

My friend William Norman Grigg is fond of using the phrase "clap for Tinkerbell" to describe this phenomenon.

Therefore, the bed-wetter will never volunteer a criticism of a Republican president. However, bed-wetting conservatives are ready to point out some minor character flaw in the President, always on domestic policy, when they are criticized as automatons of the president. They’ll say something such as: "I’ve criticized him in the past for spending proposals." But their criticism is nearly always "in the past," and never a contemporary criticism like "the president IS proposing too much spending."

Criticism of Democrats is required, especially the party’s congressional leadership, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. They’re right, of course, to say that a madam, Madame Nancy Pelosi, is now presiding over the House of Representatives as Speaker. Madams have presided over whorehouses for millennia, and it is perhaps appropriate that the House of Representatives should have its first madam. But the madam of a whorehouse is decidedly less dangerously violent than recent inhabitants of the White House have been.

Many appear to be afflicted with the view that "Democrat Party" people (they always say "Democrat," never "Democratic Party," even when Democrat party doesn’t fit grammatically) have never inhabited the White House. The exception to this psychosis is dead Democrats. Literally, the bed-wetter thinks the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. Dead Democrats are the only heroes a bed-wetter will ever cite. Bed-wetters won’t even extol the principles of Reagan any more, because his stated principles stand in too great a contrast with the Bush regime’s principles. Instead, they cite only Harry Truman and John Kennedy as heroes. And even these citations are limited to mentioning them as heroes in the context of being agents of revolutionary change in favor of general government power. They wouldn’t ever cite the restraint of a past president.

How do you cure a conservative bed-wetter? In the short term, probably the solution is ordinary drug store incontinence products. But the only real long-term cure is a regular dose of books. Bed-wetters avoid books whenever possible. Warning: Books are a part of the "liberal drive-by media," and as Stephen Colbert might say, "books have facts and facts have a known liberal bias." They do, in a laissez-faire, traditional liberalism sense.

This random contagion with books – and not the "clap for Tinkerbell" effect – is causing The War party to lose its Joementum.

Spread the word about the cure for bed-wetting conservatives!

February 19, 2007

Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a former Reagan-era Republican Party activist and current political independent (as if we needed to tell you that at the end of this article). He writes for LewRockwell.com, Pro Libertate and Antiwar.com.

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