Liberals can be idiots, too

My New Year's resolution is to stop whining about last year's presidential election. What happened in 2004 should stay in 2004. Instead, I'm going to whine about other people who whine about the election.\nIt's time to face the music, liberal America: they won. Nothing you say will make a difference now. That means there's no reason to say that Republicans are prone to in-breeding, Christianity or historical involvement with the Ku Klux Klan.\nOver the break, one of my friends told me that if you rank the average IQ of those who live in each state, the red states dominate the bottom half of the list. I smiled and nodded, asking myself in my mind, "So what?" I do believe our nation has a serious problem and that the neo-conservatives' reign of power has made our nation notably more evil than usual, but name-calling is not going to solve the problem. If anything, it makes things worse.\nThe Republicans' power over the government is derived from their power over the people, and when liberals resort to name-calling, it strengthens the conservatives' resolve to see their politicians squander homosexual rights, abolish abortion and wage pointless wars to remind the world that we really will bully it around if we don't get what we want.\nIt's kind of like when a Christian walks up to a non-Christian and says these all-too-familiar words: "If you don't confess your sins and turn your life over to Christ, you are going to hell." Most of the time, people become even more determined to never be Christians when they hear this speech. Similarly, if those on the left say the right-wing is full of what the liberals would call "mentally challenged" pencil pushers, it assures that those on the right will remain strongly set in their wicked ways.\nA few nights later in my vacation, I told someone what you just read in the paragraph above, and a French girl sitting nearby overheard some of the discussion. Later, she started talking to me, and I think she was being a little confrontational, but it was hard to tell because of her seductive French accent. Apparently, she heard me mention the word "Christianity" and tuned out the rest of the conversation. She told me that she thought I was "another one of 'them.' One of those conservatives! I swear, they're everywhere!"\nThis charming young woman is living proof that there is such a thing as an ignorant liberal. When I said that America didn't do any favors by being so insistent on sanctioning Iraq after the Persian Gulf War, she corrected me: We weren't sanctioning Iraq, we were sanctioning Saddam. Iraq itself isn't evil, only Saddam is.\nI think I got too lost in her eyes to tell her that we really were sanctioning Iraq.\nThe moral of the story is that even though liberals like to think they're smart and that conservatives are "mentally challenged," there is still plenty of stupidity, stubbornness and ignorance on both sides of the political spectrum. When you point out the obvious and choose not to do provide any ideas of what to do about it, nothing is going to change.\nIf we really want to make the world a safer place, we have to challenge partisan punditry from the inside. Liberals can't expect to stand on the sidelines and yell at the conservatives on the field to make them change their gameplan. To get inside and make a change, we need to use some basic people skills. When you think about it, that's what today's Republicans have that the Democrats don't.