Right Wing News has conducted a survey of right of center bloggers. These are the actual results. I’m not making this up–these people really believe these things.
I would expect them to prefer John McCain over Barack Obama, but some of them have a little trouble separating reality from what they wish for. 53% of them think that McCain will win the election. The next question shows why they are doing such a poor job of predicting the election results. 91% believe Sarah Palin has been a plus for the ticket.
After another chance to show their love for Sarah, the premise of the next question is more reality-based even if the answers are not. The question assumes that the Republicans will do poorly in Congressional elections but 91% believe the problem is that the Republicans have not been conservative enough. Apparently they think that Republicans would win if only more of them were like Sarah Palin.
After these answers the remainder are easy to predict. 96% believe the mainstream media has been heavily biased towards Barack Obama. This is balanced by the 4% who responded that the media was only slightly biased towards Obama. This might be related to what Stephen Colbert described as reality’s well-known liberal bias.
If they distrust reports from the media it should come as no surprise that they don’t believe what Obama says. 89% of them do not believe Obama is honest. To them every time he poses as a center-left Christian politician he is being dishonest in not “admitting” that he is really a socialist Muslim terrorist. To many conservatives disagreement is treason, making it no surprise that 76% do not believe Obama is patriotic. Disagreement on the issues to conservatives not only means you are not patriotic but that you are not competent. 88% believe that Obama is not qualified to be president, which is hypocritical but not unexpected from a group which loves Sarah Palin despite having far less experience and knowledge of the issues compared to Obama.
If the bloggers’ definition of “not conservative enough” includes “not demanding a smaller Federal presence” then I would have to agree with them that this is a (perhaps the) major reason why Republicans are going to (deservedly) get their clocks cleaned in a week.
It would be interesting to find out what percentage of the conservative bloggers think John McCain is honest. I think you have to be pretty damn delusional to apply the word to any competitive candidate for the presidency.
Well, OK, I’d have to say that Obama is “relatively” honest. I believe that he’s tried – and largely succeeded – at being honest during this election. But not completely. I sincerely believe that Obama is a pragmatist with a strong desire to be an idealist whenever possible.
I would just point out that reactionaries are called that for a reason. Not all conservatives are reactionary, but most if not all reactionaries are conservative. Our society seems to have mislabeled the right wing of the GOP as “conservatives” when they are “reactionaries”.
Maybe we need to stipulate whether we mean honest by politician standards or being totally honest. If they were answering that Obama is not honest because they don’t believe any politician is totally honest I could buy that. However I don’t think this is the case. My bet is that if there was a question as to whether McCain or Palin was honest both would get high grades for honesty from this group.
The current right wing of the GOP is certainly different from conservatives of the past. They are both more extreme and are far more socially conservative. Even Barry Goldwater considered himself a liberal in his later years in response to the GOP’s association to the religious right, and this has become far worse in more recent years.
Ron, I absolutely agree about the shift of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in general. Certainly anyone with Barry Goldwater’s principles would not be allowed anywhere near the conservative movement these days, which is a damn shame. I am slightly too young to have taken part in Goldwater’s campaign, but I knew many political activists who cut their teeth on that run. It sickens me to see what the Republican Party has become.