Mainstream? You gotta be kidding!

We don't have any premium channels at home, and I rarely see them while on the road working. But last week was an exception. I was staying in a hotel room with HBO included on the TV. One evening while flipping through the channels, I stumbled on some sort of wierd talk show run by a smirking pile of doo-doo named Bill Maher.

He had three guests, which I soon learned were Al Franken, Gore Vidal, and a young woman I didn't know and never really caught her name. It only took me about 5 seconds to figure out that these guys were talking politics from an extreme left-wing approach. So I thought I'd hang in for awhile just to see what the goofball lefties were up to recently.

It wasn't pleasant. Before long, I wanted to twist Maher's chicken neck with my left hand while pummeling the never-changing smirk into a bloody clown grin with my right. He and his pals (the female excluded) weren't just going off on W, which I've gotten very used to from that crowd. But they were going after me. Personally. Apparently I represent everything they hate in America.

What do they hate about me? Well, just that I'm a nominal Republicans to begin with. But I am also a member of a "Red State", Christian, and haven't yet swallowed the whole mythology about Iraq being harmless and the war just about making Haliburton rich.

Apparently I, and people just like me, think poor people should starve and be denied any medical treatment. That gays should be rounded up and soundy beaten. That it's perfectly fine for corporate fat cats to keep getting richer while their companies walk away from employee pensions and healthcare commitments. That the air and water can be polluted until the planet no longer supports life as long as it helps the same corporate fat cats. That other fat cats in the investment community should be able to raid social security to line their own pockets. That I am a stupid and unsophisticated bumpkin that goes along with whatever W and his talk-radio cronies tell me. And finally, that I should immediately be packed up and sent over to fight in Iraq along with the Bush twins, because if enough of us are sent over there and get blown up by insurgents, Bill and his friends can finally take over and make things right.

They have never met me or anyone like me. They have no idea what I think about the topics and issues. They cannot begin to understand that I'm upset with W about many things he's doing, but supported him enthusiastically in the last election because the alternative was so obviously and horribly worse.

Maher did most of the talking, and the audience of what I can only assume to be a handpicked bunch of New Yorkers hooted, hollered, and applauded every invective from Bill and his cronies. Franken didn't say much, but mostly sat and tried to match Maher's smirk and making the occasional comment about Halliburton, as if just stating the name of that company was enough to inspire derision. Vidal said the least, leaning on his cane like Budda and making the occasional witty Bush put-down to the audience's noisy delight. I wondered if the unknown female was the token moderate in the group, as she said very little but said nothing approaching the inflammatory drivel being spewed by the jerks surrounding her.

Understand that I'm not crude or vulgar, so I refuse to put the above messages into their own nauseating parlance. But here was a lesson in what the group of people commonly referred to as "liberal elites" are really like.

What shocked and dismayed me was the statement Maher eventually made, that he and his buddies, as well as the Democratic party, represented the mainstream of America. That nobody with any brains could possibly oppose the right-minded ideals of their beloved party. Please. Since when is partial-birth abortion and abortions for 12-year-old girls without parental consent mainstream? Since when is removing any religious expression from the public and forcing churches to hire, marry, and place gays in leadership positions mainstream? When did socialism and communism become mainstream? When did it become mainstream to agitate against your own forces and support the enemy during wartime? Is mainstream thought in America now defined by PETA, MoveOn.org, the Gay/Lesbian Alliance, Jesse Jackson, and Howard Dean? What is mainstream about opening borders to everybody who wants to come across and bankrupt our country's social services?

It's even scarier because I discovered on Sunday from Howard Dean that the whole "mainstream" argument is now officially part of the official message of the Democratic party. Apparently the Democrat's new message for the masses is "We're mainstream, and the Republicans are extremists!" The reason that's scary is because the last people on earth I want defining what is "mainstream" are Bill Maher, Gore Vidal, Al Franken, and Howard Dean.

I now fully believe that these guys have an agenda based on fooling as many people as they can to regain power. Because how else could we end up governed by a group of anti-religious anti-capitalist anti-life anti-freedom elitist thugs, but that they succeed in so obscuring the truth about their agenda that people actually vote for them because they heard the Democrats "hold the same views as me"?