What is This?

This is just another blog. It is written from a politically conservative viewpoint (I am a right leaning Republican.). It will tend to be cynical, satirical and curmudgeonly. It will be mostly about politics and pop culture, but who knows how long and how far it will go? I write a lot about liberals. They are an interesting breed of self-deceivers who defy logical explanation.

The name of my blog. Like most Americans I grew up brainwashed by liberal media, schools and government. I lived the first 20 years of my life with this feeling that we were living in a social and cultural world of idealism and inconsistencies. There were just too many inconvenient facts and unfashionable truths out there that wouldn't go away. I can always remember looking around and having this annoying feeling that "Something Ain't Right."

Why the interest in politics? I grew up in southern New Hampshire. My parents were well involved in town politics, but never really talked to me a lot about state or national politics. I think I got my interest in national politics because of the Boston television stations that we watched. The only time the Boston news stations covered NH was during the presidential primaries. So I started watching.

My coming of age in politics. Like most Americans, growing up I got most of my news from television. This was in the days before cable television, so we had ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and some oddball local stations that showed cartoons and syndicated programs. I came of age during the second President Nixon administration and the end of the Vietnam War. This was the zenith for the liberal mainstream media. I was living in a republican state and being taught that "republican" was a bad word. President Nixon and Vice-President Agnew were criminals (Agnew was, Nixon was caught losing his balance on that fine line that every president treads.), and my governor, Meldrim Thomson Jr. (NH 1973-1979), was an extremist. President Ford came along, but everyone sensed that he was just a seat warmer waiting for the democrats to reclaim the presidency. The only fond political memory I had of the 1970s was watching the hippies fail in their attempt to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, NH.

I was disillusioned with the Republican Party by the time the bicentennial came around. I saw red, white and blue bunting everywhere and equated it with the Democratic Party. I was too young to vote but I followed the elections and "supported" Scoop Jackson in the democratic primaries. Well as you know, Governor Carter won the primaries, and I couldn't support a southerner. I was a child of the biased northeast education system and had been taught that nothing good ever came out of the south (I have since grown out of that prejudice). So I turned once again to the republicans.

I just couldn't believe that President Ford the best that the republicans could come up with in 1976. He earnestly stated during a televised presidential debate that there wasn't any Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Yes, the republican incumbent had managed to make Jimmy Carter look like a hawk. Was President Ford that much afraid of the Soviet Union?

As you all know, Governor Carter won, and his presidency was a train wreck. Internationally we had a huge expansion in communist aggression as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Cubans sent troops to Africa, and communist revolution threatened Central America and the Caribbean. We had the Iranian hostage crisis and an Olympic boycott (I won't mention the loss of the Panama Canal, I think President Ford had also tried to do that.). Domestically we had high inflation, high unemployment, high marginal tax rates, and an increase in the size of the government with the addition of the Departments of Education and Energy.

It was a horrible time for our country. After four miserable years under President Carter, we were rescued by Ronald Reagan. He was the first man I voted for when I was eligible to vote for president. He was the reason I joined the United States Army.

A great thing happened during his second term that helped the American people undo years of liberal brainwashing. In 1987 the FCC's Fairness Doctrine was repealed. This regulation was originally designed to promote fairness in media. Broadcasters were supposed to offer equal time for contrasting opinions or risk losing their license. Like most regulations coming out of Washington, the result never met the intent as the Law of Unintended Consequences took over. Most broadcasters just fell into line with each other in order to avoid controversy and messing with bureaucratic requirements. That party line was liberalism and Americans only got one side of every issue. The liberals decided what to cover, how to cover it, and most importantly, what not to cover.

The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was felt immediately by talk radio. Rush Limbaugh became a huge success and led a revolution on the airways. He offered a unique viewpoint and was able to identify and most importantly, verbalize, what was wrong with liberalism. He offered a conservative view that connected with most Americans and helped fight years of brainwashing. He was the blue collar Bill Buckley. This revolution continued to spread as cable television began to offer more choices, and later when the internet evolved into a mostly conservative medium.

On a side note. Look for the liberals to try to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. They are losing in the free marketplace of ideas and, as usual, look for government regulation to help them.

Currently the political power nationwide is typically equally split between conservatives and liberals. The conservatives have the numbers in elected officials, (national and state) but the liberals benefit from a government institution that has grown liberal after 150 years of abuse. But there is hope. The liberals appear to be dying off. They still have their cronies in the old media (broadcast television, newspapers and magazines), but they are dying on the vine. Other traditional liberal groups are also aging and slowly withering away. Labor unions are dying as industry modernizes. Feminism died with President Clinton's Oval Office antics. Gun control and radical environmentalism died with Al Gore's political career. I am hopeful that the northeast elitist brand of liberalism has died with John Kerry's candidacy and Ted Kennedy's downward spin into obsolescence.

The two die hard liberal bastions that continue to survive are Hollywood and academia. This doesn't surprise me. Neither one of these places is grounded in realism. They are both places people go to escape from reality, much like Washington D.C.

I am not anti-higher education. I am the proud owner of some. But I am against having our young students largely educated by professors who entered college as 18 year olds and never left.

So hear I am, roughly 20 years later hoping to help the conservative revolution with my blog. Do we need another pundit? Yes, our schools are doing such a horrible job of teaching logic and critical thinking. I hope to be able to connect to some who have not experienced the conservative revolution. I also hope to avoid my own self-deception. The observations and comments of one person tend to tell you more about that one person than whatever he is commenting on.

This is Bindi, my semi-retarded dog with an oversized head. She is a shelter rescue who has already had a litter of pups. So she is a former homeless single mother who we adopted and had sterilized.

I don't know what breed she is. She looks like a Dingo, the wild dog of Australia that lives in the Outback and snatches white babies from picnickers. She also loves the sunshine (most dogs prefer the shade) so I am thinking she is an Australian breed, perhaps some kind of Heeler. If you know the breed please let me know.

Something Ain't Right What is This?