Addressing The Conservative Dilemma While Worrying About Baby Birds

My post on Saturday was all "I love R.E.M." and "I love my hubs" and "Ooooooooh, baby birds!"  and that was great, right?  I mean, who DOESN'T love baby fricking birds and wasn't it nice to read something positive and cheerful and NotHannahInHerRightMindful?  I'm still in my right mind (and worried about the baby birds with the awful storms approaching from the west...blech), but I'm not feeling as positive and cheerful, mainly because the freaking conservative RepublicanTeaPartyJerkoid politicians are breaking my face.

It has occurred to me more and more frequently in the last few days that the current crop of Republicans AND Tea Partiers count on their followers to be dumbasses.  If you are a follower of the Republicans or Tea Partiers, please do not think that I am assuming you are a dumbass.  In fact, I'm willing to bet you AREN'T a dumbass, but you must be pretty fricking uncomfortable as several things come to light and it dawns on you that you and your values (which I respect, my friend...truly) are being used like a two-bit whore. 

Ahem.

In list form, because the storms in the west are freaking me out and my brain won't do things like, you know, make paragraphs:

1. The current governor of Georgia is a dude named Nathan Deal.  Sad to say, I supported Nathan Deal during the first election I voted in, primarily because he was a Democrat and that's the way I thought voting should be done back then.  Nathan switched parties after the '94 election after it became clear that NOT supporting President Clinton's tough immigration laws would be the right way to go if he wanted to keep the big carpet and agriculture money coming his way.  I mean, I'm not saying the two are connected or anything.  Anywho, despite some rather wonky money stuff with his family, having to declare bankruptcy mid-election season, AND some ethics investigations, Nathan became the governor because he convinced the God-fearing conservative citizens that he hated Teh Gays and abortion rights even more than Karen Handel.  Also, he would lower taxes, which seems to be the thing that really gets conservative voters all excited.  No gay rights AND lower taxes?  Hells to the yeah.  It's a perfect world, people, with the marginalized tax-paying citizens of our state even more marginalized AND more money to spend on the cheap carpet and chicken and strawberries the other marginalized (but non-citizen, so justifiably) folks provide for us.  BOOYAH!!  Roy Barnes, the Democratic candidate, was anti-gay marriage BUT he was pro-choice, so clearly, he was gonna lose.  Which he did, of course.  So now, Nathan is all "ooooh, I'm going to lower the tax rate across the board," which is probably all that a lot of conservatives are going to hear and they're gonna be all tickled pink BUT they need to hold the phone, because in addition to lowering the tax rate in a mystical kind of way that means that I will actually pay MORE taxes next year because I make less than $500,000 a year, Nathan and his buddyroes are going to INCREASE taxes on things like cell phone and cable service.  You know, the things middle class people like me enjoy because we can't afford to go to the opera in Prague every weekend.  Nathan Deal counts on people to believe that he is a moral man because he stands against two things which will in all likelihood NEVER affect him, but in reality, he is a slimy politician who also counts on people not to actually pay attention to his policies.  PAY ATTENTION, Y'ALL.
2. There's this dude named Larry Fincher, a Tea Party darling from Tennessee.  He's pro-gun, pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and pro-limited government.  Oh, oh, AND...y'all, he's a gospel singer.  Yes, ma'am.  This guy is pretty much a pin-up for modern conservatives who see that he's a GOSPEL SINGER and he LOVES GUNS and he wants to LIMIT GOVERNMENT, but who somehow don't see that he has been given millions of dollars by the federal government to grow cotton.  Blink.  MILLIONS.  Wikipedia puts the subsidies from the government to the company he owns half of at over eight million.  The Environmental Working Group puts it at three million.  The man got a grant from the federal government (you know, the one he wants to limit) for $13,000 to buy a tractor or something, because apparently, the other three (or eight) million bucks he received didn't quite cover it.  Now, listen.  I'm all for helping out farmers.  Really.  But if you are being made a millionaire by the federal government to grow fracking cotton and can't even buy your own fracking tractor AND you want to talk to me about limiting government while the taxpayers for whom you want to deny equal protection under the Constitution (which you practically rub on your naked body in front of conservative voters) PAY FOR YOUR TRACTOR, well...I'm sorry, Mr. Fincher.  But you can just go on back to your county fairs and sing about loving one another or walking in the garden with your deity, because I don't want you in my government.  Because you are a slimy, two-faced scum bucket who--again--is counting on people not to pay attention.  PAY ATTENTION, Y'ALL.  (And you might want to look into Michelle "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann's subsidy history while you're at it.)
3. Scott Walker, the asshat governor from Wisconsin who thinks that state workers get paid too much and who hates unions and who is an asshat (did I mention that?) just gave a high-paying state job to the non-college graduate, DUI-having son of a donor.  An $80,000 state job to a non-college graduate--and he's already received a raise, bless his heart.  Are you flipping KIDDING me?  Honestly, is ANYBODY paying attention out there?  
4. It's hard for me to articulate this without sounding pretentious.  And I HATE sounding pretentious.  And I am well aware that the president I elected to Change our Country has not, you know, necessarily changed as much as I would want him to (although to be honest, I blame a lax liberal voting pool, a bunch of money-swilling Republicans, and Emanuel Rahm for a great deal of that) and despite this, I will vote for him because the folks the other parties are trotting out aren't going to cut it.  I mean, I WISH I could support the Green Party, but Cynthia McKinney is not who I want as president.  Sorry.  I digress.  Here's what I want to say:  conservative citizens in this country want to believe that if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be.  They want to believe that the system we have set up here in our country makes that happen.  They want to believe that a person who shares (or SAYS he shares) their spiritual values also shares their fiscal values, but that doesn't seem to be true.  Because the reality of it is that the conservative politicians today desperately need the deep pockets of the very few people who DO manage to become exactly what they want to be to keep those politicians in power.  They need the votes of decent conservative citizens to put them physically in office, but once they are IN office, they don't give a damn about those citizens.  They give a damn about (and a lot of money and tax cuts and perks to)  the rich folks who paid for their television ads that accused their Democratic opponents of being awful, gay-licking, abortion-forcing hedonists and won them the votes they needed.  It is an awful, vicious cycle and it needs to be broken.  Social conservatives are going to have to realize that they simply can't vote with their morality any more, because the folks they're voting for don't seem to have the morals they run on.
5. I actually just erased a long, rambling (I know, it's shocking) diatribe about how we should have two separate elections (with separate representatives) for fiscal and social issues, but realized that those issues have become so entwined in our messed-up political system that it's going to take some brave folks stepping forward and saying "my religion doesn't matter, but here's my voting record on spending) to change anything.
6. Then I ate a few organic chocolate chips.
7. And said a prayer for my baby birds.
8. And dithered around for a while trying to come up with something awesome to say.  But...that didn't work out.
9. So I looked at the radar and freaked out a little bit more.
10. Then I went to go find a poem for the new National Poetry Month page I put up.  And while I totally didn't mean to do this and I was simply just looking for a poem about birds or maybe about being decent, I found another Mary Oliver poem.  Mary Oliver rocks.  And, clearly, she pays attention.