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[horses4courses]

Good article from a liberal perspective.
Points out how conservatives have lost their way.
They are little more than a complete bunch of frauds these days.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/f...ples-1.3467139

We are due a public retraction on a grand scale. Conservatives have long pretended to adhere to certain core values, timeless truths they hold sacred and (of course) immutable. And what is becoming ever more starkly obvious is that they don’t really believe these things at all, or at least that they find them important only when liberals are allegedly violating them.

The US national debt, now $21 trillion, will soar to more than $33 trillion in 2028. It will then be 96 per cent of GDP, the highest level since the second World War. If these projections were issued under a Democratic administration the response from conservatives in the US and worldwide would be apoplectic and apocalyptic. Hell would be at the gates.
When Barack Obama was in power conservatives pretended to see the growing fiscal deficit as a threat to civilization as we know it. In 2011 the Republicans brought government to a standstill by demanding nothing less than a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets and an elimination of the deficit.

Conservatives pretended to see deficits not just as a fiscal and economic question but also as a moral test. They were tokens of laxity, irresponsibility, ill discipline and a refusal to face hard choices. They were the external numerical expression of the internal spiritual weakness of the left. The real deficit was not in money but in character.

Deficits “proved” that contemporary societies could no longer “afford” public health and welfare systems. But, oddly enough, they don’t prove that contemporary societies cannot afford enormous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

If Barack Obama’s lawyer paid off a porn star to conceal her story of having sex with him shortly after his wife had given birth, we know how conservatives would have reacted: with rage, disgust and jeremiads about the way liberals were leading the world into a moral cesspit. When it was revealed that this had actually happened with Donald Trump the same conservatives suddenly discovered that the sexual behaviour of a president is irrelevant.

White evangelical Protestants continue to be the bedrock supporters of Trump, a self-declared sexual predator. There has been some loss of support among women evangelicals, but overall that base has remained solid. This is not because religious conservatives do not believe Stormy Daniels (more believe her than Trump) but because they don’t really care. Moral outrage at sexual turpitude turns out to be another selective weapon, a sword to be wielded against liberals but sheathed when the sinners are on the right side.

If 1 per cent of what is known about the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Russians had been shown to be the case in relation to any Democratic president, conservatives would have cried treason. They would have characterized that presidency as an affront to American patriotism and as fundamentally illegitimate.

Law and order have long been at heart of conservative values. But even these values now seem to be contingent on where the threat to law and order is coming from. The conservative ideal of the rule of law was always rooted in the idea that the state should be “a government of laws and not of men”. The right has increasingly attacked this principle: the state must be the government of the strong man.

Yet again we know what conservatives would say if a liberal president were regularly denouncing the FBI. And yet again it turns out that they don’t really care very much. Conservatism has lost the will to be conservative. It knows what it is against – liberals and the left – but has forgotten what it is for.