My wife can’t understand why I listen to right-wing blowhards like Lars Larson, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Victoria Taft, John Gibson, and Bill O’Reilly. I tell her that driving along with Lars on the radio gives me the cardiovascular equivalent of a two-mile jog, my heart rate and blood pressure rise so much.
More seriously, I love it when I catch one of these pontificators in an especially blatant conservative hypocrisy. Which is common. That’s one reason why the Republicans did so poorly in the mid-term elections: voters were fed up with all the say one thing and do another crap.
Recently I turned to KXL and heard Lars Larson speaking with a woman who must have been with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (can’t remember her name, if I ever heard it).
The interview turned to cougars, one of the many subjects Lars is spectacularly ill-informed about (see my “Lars Larson tells half the story (again)” post).
Previously he’d grilled the woman about why fewer Oregonians are getting hunting licenses. His theory was that it’s because there aren’t enough wild animals to hunt. But Lars’ guest explained that every state is seeing a decline in hunting licenses since the population is getting older and more people are choosing to simply enjoy nature rather than killing nature.
Undeterred by facts, Lars pressed on. He said that Oregon is being overrun with cougars. If they weren’t killing so many deer, hunters would be more successful. And isn’t it mankind’s prerogative to kill those deer instead of a cougar?
That’s a highly dubious assumption—nature knows best when it comes to managing prey-predator populations—but the ODFW person more or less agreed with him and proudly brought up the Oregon Cougar Plan. My view of this travesty is that it’s a slap in the face to voters and based on fictions not facts.
Regardless, it’s now in effect. We taxpayers are paying good money to hire government employees to kill cougars who might, just might, perhaps cause a problem one day in parts of the state where inaccurate estimates of the cougar population imply that the herd of big cats needs to be thinned.
Even if what is being sighted and complained about is a kitty cat.
Lars asked the woman why even more cougars aren’t being killed. She explained that not once, but twice, the citizens of Oregon voted to ban the hunting of cougars with dogs. And it’s damn difficult to kill a cougar without the aid of a canine.
Now, you’d think that this would be the end of Lars’ ranting. On this particular subject, at least. Don’t conservatives believe in the people having the final say about social policies? Aren’t conservatives against judges and government bureaucrats standing in the way of what the public wants?
Seemingly you’d think so. But not if you heard Lars arguing that the citizens of Oregon can’t be trusted when it comes to managing cougars. He brushed aside those two statewide votes where a majority said, “No hunting cougars with dogs.” He said that the ODFW should control the cougar population on its own since Oregonians are clueless about wildlife management.
Well, somehow I suspect that Lars would have been singing a different tune if voters had approved the parental notification measure concerning abortion that was on the November ballot. Would he be arguing that professionals from Planned Parenthood should decide how abortions are handled in the state, rather than voters?
Conservatives are for local control until they feel like locals aren’t controlling things to their right-wing liking. Then they’re all for centralized government taking over, as in the horrific Terri Schiavo case.
Their hypocrisy is obvious. To me and, thankfully, to the 53% of Americans who voted Democratic in the last election. Conservatives no longer have consistent values. The only thing they value is staying in power.
Now that this is largely gone—and hopefully the 2008 presidential election will be the icing on the Republican power-loss cake—the vacuity of conservative “thinking” (loosely put) is marvelously clear.
Just listen to Lars Larson if you need confirmation.
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