I can relate Rick, I really can

Congrats to Rick Moran for six years of Blogging:

The parade is passing me by and I have fallen out of step with most of my conservative friends. When I write now, I write for my own amusement or to clarify my own thoughts about a particular issue – something that I have tried to do for the last six years. It’s amazing how shallow one’s thinking truly is unless you force yourself to justify yourself to yourself in writing. “Reading maketh a full man, conference, a ready man, and writing, an exact man” said Francis Bacon. I have tried, within the limits of my own feeble intelligence and failing will, to live up to those words, thus attempting to fulfill what philosophers refer to as “An Examined Life.”

Oddly, while my examination of the underpinnings of my conservative beliefs has led me away from what I suppose is the “mainstream” of what passes for conservative thought these days, the primary goal I set when I began blogging – becoming a commercial success as a writer – has been achieved beyond my imaginings. Ironically, far fewer conservatives read and agree with what I have to say these days then when I was making no money at all. There’s a cosmic lesson to found there – I just haven’t been able to determine what it is yet. Perhaps it’s that the gods have a cruel sense of humor and, like the elf Puck says in Midsummer’s Night Dream, they spend much of their time in rollicking laughter at “…what fools these mortals be.”

It’s lonely being a fool. As I have struggled to find a way to reconcile a robust, philosophically coherent, and consistent conservatism that has meaning for America in the 21st century with the riot of conceits, resentments, paranoia, and narrow mindedness that much of the right has become, I have found myself standing on the curb watching the clowns, the garish floats, the brass bands all roll by, marching toward the precipice and willingly – joyously – jumping over the cliff, trying to take the whole damn country with them.

“To what end?” I wail. “RINO!” they scream at me incoherently as they disappear into the maw of history. At a time when the tenets of conservatism, if applied intelligently and consistently to governance, can help revitalize the United States and this wonderful experiment in self government and individual liberty, the right chooses to eschew governance altogether in favor of a putrid ideological war “to save America.” Just how they intend doing so by trying to implement an agenda that’s 30 years old while immolating lawmakers who dare suggest that working with the opposition to come up with solutions to address our massive problems is necessary, I don’t see. I don’t believe they’ve gotten that far in their thinking yet.

via REFLECTIONS ON SIX YEARS OF BLOGGING @ Right Wing Nut House.

My God. I feel like I am reading my own writing. Rick, if you happen to read this; buddy, I can relate. I so can. I will put putting you back on the blogroll. I did take you out by mistake. Hang in there man, it will get better — I assure you of that.