Eating Conservatives

FLB claims conservatives eat their young. I'm trying to think how that would work. We can't use ketchup, because it's red--duh!--and goodness knows there will be no French's mustard employed. Perhaps it will just be A-1 steak sauce, in honour of our rightful place in the front of the line of the universe. And the preferred draft status.

All kidding aside. Or most kidding aside...
In the "Let's Roger Roger" sweepstakes from Sarcastro's that I'm stirring up again, I see that Terry has said this:

I regularly take fellow Republicans to task for what I believe to be straying from conservative principles.

I've seen this thinking for years among parties of the left-leaning ideologies. Words cannot describe how happy I am to see it cropping up on the Eastern side of the continuum as well.

Politics is not a religion. I don't fear a theocracy, because the probability of any theocratic government in the U.S. is just about as high as the number of pounds I lose over Christmas. I do fear the elevation of party ideology to theosophic standard, though.

Politics is a zero-sum game by definition. One candidate will win, while the other loses. Governance, however, is to be a sum-all proposition. Everyone is to come away served by their involvement, whether by guns or by butter.

The minute anybody starts talking about a political party as though it were an unfailing power, you lose the sum-all proposition of governance. It becomes more about a punch-card binding, a stifling of free thought. Blind party loyalty is the death of reason.