Michael
Those of us who participate on these political blogs are engaging a process. It is a process of political change within ourselves that gets articulated over time. We are looking at the world and our government and ourselves and thinking aloud. That's really all it is, at least for me.
I started blogging in the summer of 2005 on Daily Kos. (UID 55,790) This was at the height of my disgust and hatred toward the Bush administration. Daily Kos was important at the time, as were some other online progressive-left venues, such as Common Dreams and Crooks and Liars and MoveOn.org, because millions of us were finding one another after the trauma not only of 9/11 but the jingoistic and violent Bush administration reaction to 9/11 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That was almost seven years ago, now, and naturally my political views have evolved and changed since then. At the time, I was fully in-line with the progressive-liberal agenda. I despised Bush and his cronies because I did not believe that they had the well-being of the American people at heart, nor did I trust them to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
I considered the Republicans the enemy.
But I do not any longer.
Freeing oneself from ideological or party partisanship is a funny and difficult process. I cannot say how these things go for everyone, but for me it took the form of a mere crack in the ideological glass windshield, so to speak. That's the way that I think of it. A crack formed in the glass and then the crack became a web of cracks that spread throughout the whole until almost the entire edifice came crashing down. And the thing of it is... the Catch 22 of it... is that most people do not know that they are in thrall of ideological group-think until they break away from it and they often can't break away from it until they recognize that they are in thrall to it.
This is part of the reason why so many people maintain their ideological inclinations and tendencies throughout their entire lives.
The first real cracks in the edifice for me, you will not be surprised to learn, came when I saw the most extreme hatred and vile distortions aimed at the Jewish state, horrendously enough in the name of "human rights" and "social justice." At first I did not really know what to make of it. At the time, I certainly favored Israel, but I did not follow that country very closely, nor was I concerned about American or world attitudes toward that country.
This is because I was ignorant. I simply did not realize the effect or level of hatred spit at Israel from a movement that I thought composed of my ideological brothers and sisters. At first I tried very hard to maintain a certain fair balance between anti-Zionists and pro-Israel people. I tried very hard to be open-minded even to the extent of having Jon the Anti-Zionist Jew (of Daily Kos fame) almost convince me that the single state solution was really in everyone's best interest.
But as time went by, and as I more and more followed progressive-left I-P discourse, and as I read more and more about the history of the conflict and the history of the Jewish people under Islam, I realized the full extent of the vicious propaganda campaign taking place internationally for the purpose of dissolving Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land. I became aware of the progressive campaigns against Israel on the campuses, in the political journals and blogs, within the so-called "human rights" organizations, and, needless to say, within the United Nations.
As I considered this over time, I also began considering the extreme hatred coming out of progressive-left venues not only toward Israel, but toward their political rivals on the right. A wake-up call came for me when so many progressives vehemently blamed Sarah Palin for the Tuscon shooting last year. I just couldn't believe that "liberals" were making such horrendous claims and it forced me to realize that the progressive movement is no better than the conservative movement, and perhaps considerably worse, when it comes to slandering the other side.
Thus I am now free of political partisanship.
And that means that whole areas of consideration are open because I am not limited by the ever growing list of Politically Correct Multicultural Taboos.
And that is something that I highly recommend.
Oh, and by the way, the left is considerably more racist than is the right.
FYI.
{I will be happy to explain that going forward.}
Listen to the tune above for a quick trip down memory lane.
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