Snark all you want, mojo. Sam Brownback is on the rise. A true conservative will be the nominee and will trounce whatever lib the Democrat party puts up against him.

Keep up on the latest Brownback buzz at Blogs 4 Brownback.

Why do conservative idiots come to MoJo? Psycheout, I welcome the Republicans nominating Brownback. If there's one sure way that the Democrats win in '08, it's if they are running against a nut like him. Hell, we could probably nominate Kucinich and still beat Brownback!

And on that note, I guarantee that 41% of the public has no idea who Sam Brownback is, except perhaps to know that he must be the Republican if they are being asked about him in comparison to Clinton and Obama. What this poll shows is that 41% won't vote for Clinton. A good portion of them won't vote for Brownback either when they find out what a radical nut case he is.

adam,

I think you may be missing the point of blogging. I'm quite strongly liberal, by a test I took long ago, more so than Gandhi and Mandela, and would still say that calling a conservative an idiot is not a way to make a point.

Personally I know one or two true conservatives, not the radical right wingers that have taken the lead in the Repubican party of the present. They can be quite well informed and are just looking for smaller government and more fiscal responsibility than either party offers today.

I have tried making the point that the current Democratic party is actually MORE fiscally conservative than the current Repubican one. At least the Dems recognize that if they spend more, they will have to raise taxes, not just float more paper. The borrow-and-spend Reps keep increasing the debt and leaving it to someone else to pay it back.

However, that said, the Reps of today are NOT conservative. I'd be interested to see what would happen if a true conservative, that wanted only minor changes over what we had a generation ago, and a true liberal were running against each other. That would be an interesting race. It would be a race with two good candidates instead of choosing between the lesser of two evils.

I would vote for the liberal in that case. But, a true conservative could still be libertarian in views and might not be advocating a Christian theocracy, as the current Reps are. If that were the case, I might be unhappy but not miserable with the outcome if I lost.

Psycheout, I'd be curious to hear whether this description of the true conservative matches your opinion or whether you mean a neo-con trying to create the Democratic Peoples' Republic of the Christian States of America.

Scott - I understand what you are saying, and certainly agree with the content of your argument. However, I think that someone using "Democrat party" qualifies as an idiot. It's either meant to be disparaging, or Psycheout is unable to differentiate between a noun and an adjective. In either case, I'm not impressed.

Besides which, getting technical, the "true conservative" you are describing is actually the "classic liberal" of John Locke, et al. The labels are all pretty fluid. Conservatism has split into libertarian and theocratic wings, but I'd still call both conservative. But I will concede that I should have referred to Psycheout as a "Republican idiot" rather than a "conservative idiot".

I just checked on Brownback's voting record. He's an extreme right-wing radical with absolutely no hint of genuine old-school conservatism.

Psycheout, I think you may need to buy a dictionary. And, you may need to rethink the labels you choose for yourself. This guy is very very far from being conservative by any real definition. If you support him, I'd guess that you are as well.