There are GOP blog posts that confuse me, here and here. They scorn one of their own, Jim Abeler, R. Anoka.
Quite simply, if Jim Abeler is a RINO, what is a Republican?
Get real. The man's life has been as straight up Republican as you can be.
Consistently, except he's not been a Gingrich or a DeLay, he has a conscience, and is a more traditional but quite conservative legislator. He saw a state in need of transportation infrastructure upgrading and rehabilitation. He did not suggest the tooth fairy would pay the bills, as others apparently seem to expect as sensible.
And - this is my point of confusion - not one word about Pawlently enabling the atrocious wasteful raw local pork has shown up in those same hypercritical GOP blogs, yet the facts are as clear as the post below this one presents things. Go figure.
Not a peep from those folks about His Honor, Pawlenty, "Guv the Enabler."
Enabling a new-style special tax, for old-style nothing-new-here plain raw pork.
I guess if I did not expect intellectual honesty, consistency, and basic sincerity, perhaps I would be less confused and I could just shrug it all off as politics fathering a jaundiced view.
But that is cynical. I am not a cynic. So instead, I will rely on simple analogy, (rather than thinking "bad motive"), for the best explanation I can imagine. One of my thought mentors, Joseph Heller, had one character in Catch 22 he described as like a flounder, a fish with both eyes on one side of his head who could only see things that way, one-sidedly.
They are floundering.
That's it.