Wow, this is fun. I haven't written this much in a while.

I started out today intending to refer to a SpankThatDonkey post I saw at home this morning about conservatives sticking together, but I can't get to it from here. Others have already discussed it anyway.

Side note to future bloggers: If you want to be seen from behind an aggressive firewall, you probably shouldn't put the word "spank" in your domain name. :)

So instead I've landed on SWAC Girl's Strategies For Republicans.

I'm really sort of fascinated by SWAC Girl's blog. Maybe I don't get out enough, but it's the only blog I can think of that has the fantastical, almost delusional tone of a raving moonbat liberal, yet it's actually coming from a (presumably) serious wingnut conservative. Wingnut types usually try to influence people with intellectual gymnastics and authoritarian pronouncements, masking their core logical fallacies behind a bloviating web of smoke and mirrors.

Not so with SWAC Girl. I feel a bit sorry for her. It's as if she truly believes there are evil, mind-controlling media slugs out there, a la The Puppet Masters, taking over the country and turning people into zombified "liberals," and she and her slug-free cohorts in Staunton are the only ones who can stop them.

Unfortunately they can't really tell who's infected and who isn't, so they end up walling themselves inside a compound and shooting anyone they don't recognize just to be sure.

It presents a dilemma. This reminds me of a time I tried to debate with a hardcore Evangelical who had similarly illogical (to me) core beliefs. It didn't work too well. It was like we were speaking different languages. Whenever I made what I thought was a reasonable and valid point, all this person heard was something like, "I am the devil and I'm going to eat your soul!" Eventually I gave up, and the whole experience left me bewildered and somewhat less enthusiastic about the human capacity to evolve and learn new things.

So it's tempting to simply ignore SWAC Girl, and I probably will by next week, but there's still a nagging voice in the back of my mind that wonders whether someone like that could actually gain power if left unchallenged. I can think of a lot of people I've seen in my life who've had much higher levels of authority and influence than they should have.

Instead, I'll take a chance and address a couple of specific issues in SWAC Girl's post.

She began by mentioning the "liberal lefty mainstream media." The media interests me, too. But from my own observations, I would contend that the media is not so much liberal or conservative, but more sensationalist. I could concede that it may sometimes appear liberal because of their shameless efforts to inject more and more entertainment into the stories, which invariably involves more and more artistic license, and artistry is generally viewed distastefully by most conservatives.

In any case, I certainly agree that the mainstream media should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Like almost anything in the hands of a human being, it can be a tool for good or evil. And there's no doubt it's used by people with agendas all the time. But I don't think it's very wise to conclude that the media itself is the enemy. (Well, not all the time, at least.)

I can't really follow SWAC Girl's logic in the rest of the post. First she says politicians "have to play nice with both sides of the aisle," then she declares, "This is politics. We can't 'all get along.'" I can only guess she's trying to say that in order to "win" next time, conservative candidates should try to deceive the voters by pretending to be more moderate and friendly on the campaign trail, and then turn back into cold-blooded liberal-hating conservatives once they're elected.

I hope I'm wrong about that. I already have some antipathy toward the modern political system, but implications like that from a self-professed Republican "grassroots" worker are downright depressing. At least have the decency to keep the attempted voter fraud in the smoky back rooms where it belongs.

Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a moderate commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.