Samizdat

Recently I've been baraged with emails from well-meaning friends who are understandably in a state of high anxiety about the election.  I can't say I've been entirely sanguine myself, but faced with certain realities, my  first thought for the sake of my own mental health is to start to plan.  Before I turn my back on this election cycle, next Wednesday (we hope), I would just like to air a couple of small complaints about some of my fellow conservatives.

To all the bloggers that I met with months ago:  We listened, connected and decided to bounce off one another to create a small Austin-centered conservative buzz by writing for one another, in particular, the folks with smaller blogs were invited to  submit to the two biggest conservative blogs in town with posts about local issues.  Although the meeting was called by the author of a well respected political blog (one of the two aforementioned) we never had another meeting.  My submissions and emails to him have been ignored.  The author of the other blog has been more generous and generally in the spirit of cooperation (he did a great post on the UT debate.)  But why are we all in our own little boxes, still? 

Related to this is the Americans for Prosperity Summit.  I haven't heard a word from them.  I signed up with them, I paid my money, they have all my information (I submitted it online) and nothing. Zeeeero.  The point of the summit was to initiate some grassroots activism on the internet through our blogs, facebook, etc.  We conservatives are basically pretty retarded about this stuff, and frankly, we're skittish about the kooks it tends to attract (exhibit A:  the Pauliac extolling the virtues of Facebook who said, "And to this day, Ron Paul is my biggest friend.")  Nevertheless, we took this to heart, and we had the meeting I mentioned.  So much for that.

Finally, my local party is being eaten from within by Pauliacs.  A healthy organization pushes the kooks to the fringe and keeps them there.  Ron Paul is an opportunistic infection and just like a virus, all he needed was an opening.  Thank you Congress, and thank you George Bush, for creating the gaping wound in our core.  Shame on us, too, for letting our guys get away with that.

If Mark Steyn and Thomas Sowell are right, we will cross the Rubicon with the election of Barack Obama and a supermajority in the Senate.  Bill Ayers will have his day, finally.