Conservatives Cost a Lot of Money
White men produced the Constitution. Liberals assert that what they produced is primary, while conservatives assert that who they were is primary. Increasingly, conservatives seem ready to throw everything away in order to maintain dominance — the Constitution, the good opinion of the rest of the world, the lives and limbs and sanity of our soldiers, the health and habitability of the Earth, and their own claims to common sense and decency. Conservatives want to return us to a primitive conception of the world, even though we know better.
The case is frequently made that conservatives and liberals have different temperaments, and this is surely so. Cheney’s 1% Doctrine is the quintessential conservative idea — the world is so dangerous that if there is a 1% chance of an attack on America, then we have to go all out to stop it. There is a sort of surface bravery about this idea, but beyond that, it makes absolutely no sense tactically or strategically. It is like going to the track and betting the house on a 99 to 1 shot. Many conservatives refuse to be convinced that a subtler approach is safe enough or effective enough. But let’s put it this way: carpet bombing is much more costly in every way than good intelligence and loyal allies. It’s a pocketbook issue.
Jane Smiley | HuffingtonPost.com