Dr. Helen Comes Out As A Republican

Annoyed by the derision she gets for expressing "right-leaning libertarian views," she decides to annoy back and declare herself a capital-R Republican.

Her journey to the Dark Side is almost complete. (She can't be Sith until she embraces the "c" word.)

That's sort of the way it goes. When in DC, meeting with a couple of DC-area commenters and readers, we were talking for a bit about liberalism being the default setting for someone's politics, and how it takes a while for someone born into that default setting to get comfortable affirmatively rejecting liberalism. First comes the half-step of announcing a third party affiliation (for me it was being an "independent" or "moderate;" for many it's being a "libertarian") and only after a time saying, "Ah, the hell with it. Who am I fooling? I'm a Republican."

Not that there's no such thing as libertarianism. It's a real political system (or so I'm told). It's just that this country has a very binary political structure, and, at some point, most do have to decide which of the two parties is closest to their personal policy preferences.

Or, in reality: Which of the two parties annoys you the least, or whose bullshit is least objectionable. A lot of it is a gut-level feeling of sympathy or, more commonly, antipathy.

I'm not the strongest conservative on the blog-dial as far as beliefs, but I'm so damned turned off by the worse aspects of the standard liberal personality profile I come off a lot more strident than I actually am.

There's a bit more there about the need to attack liberals versus, as Ann Althouse says, the need to expose "nasty lefty" commenters' "lack of character, brainpower, and substance... [sarcastically] Yeah, more nastiness, that's what we need."

I'm afraid I don't really see much of a difference there, Professor. Reminds me of my favorite line in Love & Death:

"Are you afraid of death?"

"I'm not afraid of death... but I fear it."

"That's an interesting distinction."

I suppose the distinction in in the word "nastiness," but one person's snark is another person's Unwarranted Attack On My Very Humanity.

At any rate, glad to have her aboard.

I can't post her picture, because once or twice it's amusing, the third time on it's technically cyberstalking.

posted by Ace at 12:32 PM

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