Friday Night Cat Blogging

Cat. Mouse. Get it?

I sent this to Aravosis since he's asking for ABlog readers to send pictures of their pets. If you surf into AmericaBlog at the exact right moment, you'll see your pet on the index page. Don't say I never did anything for you, Popeye.

Speaking of Aravosis, he mentioned something interesting on Twitter earlier today. He said, and I'm lightly paraphrasing, that we tend to hold our boyfriends to a higher degree of accountability than we do our own President. That's pretty damn hard to argue with and it's a pretty disturbing reality. I think it's safe to say that, no matter who your boyfriend (or girlfriend) is, chances are their job isn't as important as the Chief Executive's.

So how come we're infinitely more forgiving of our President than we are our Significant Others considering how much higher the stakes are?

It leads to a minor epiphany I just had. We've heard definitions of what makes a liberal, a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican. But the one that seems the most empirical is that the liberal mind can think beyond personal interests and consider first and foremost the interests of Humanity with a capital H.

Conservatives, a typically self-absorbed and greedy lot (look at the Randians currently infesting Wall Street like a pack of gabardined jackals), cannot see beyond their own pig snouts.

Maybe you all have already come to settle on that definition of what it means to be a liberal but I never said I was a prodigy. In some pragmatic aspects of life, I'm still playing catch up. But the evidence of my claim is overwhelming. While the antiwar movement may be in a moribund state, those of us who have been opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for five years or more don't need a draft and to have our own skin in the meat grinder to oppose it. Even those liberals who have health insurance fight for those 48,000,000 of us who don't have it.

Empathy is the key to distinguishing between the two ideologies and that is why conservative thought tends to look like a DSM IV come to life.