I don't know why I continue wading around in the muck, battering away at the closed minds of my classmates. So far it appears the only headway I've achieved is convincing them I'm just as hard-headed as they are. Our conversations have been spirited to say the least, but blown all over the political landscape, buffeted by great gusts of bullshit, often from 2 or 3 directions at once. I've learned so much from these great minds that I feel compelled to jot down some of their brilliance for posterity. From the last week or so:

Invading Iraq was a good idea then and I think it's still a good idea today. I don't have 20/20 hindsight like you liberals do.

Translation: How many times I gotta tell ya, hindsight is for pussies. We're Amurkins. We ain't interested in learning from our mistakes.

Reagan was the best president we've ever had.

Yeah, I thought this one was old and tired too, until I heard it uttered so reverently by one of the true believers that it made me nauseous. And sad. And maybe a little scared.

The only reason Obama is doing so well is liberal America wants to assuage their liberal guilt by voting for a black man. Come November, when he doesn't get elected president, though, there'll be riots. Like Rodney King all over again.

This one's always accompanied by the latest Obama-in-a-turban photos and Obama's-preacher-is-a-crazy-nigger chain e-mails. (hee-hee, cheney mails...) It's become so tedious that I've taken to just calling them cowards, afraid of the big, scary Negrobama and what he'll do to their white women.

OIl company profit margins are only 4 percent, you can look that up.

Okay asshole, I will. Click, click, click, 9.8 percent. Thanks for playing, though. And don't worry, I'm sure those profits are quite small when seen from space. The oil industry is putting up record profits, making more money than any industry in history. More importantly, they are relying directly on the US military to secure and maintain those profits. I have a problem with that. Humph. (Interestingly, while a-googling to put the letter to this lie I found that the most consistently profitable industry over the last several years has been the currently in deep doo-doo banking industry. This reminder of just how illusory the whole concept of "market" actually is made me feel a little hamsterwheelish.)

The best thing that ever happened to this country was these corporations shipping all the manufacturing jobs overseas. Amurkins are smarter than everybody else. Let them screw in the screws and put stuff together. We can concentrate on the service industry. That's where all the money is anyway.

This one left me gawping like a fish on the dock. I still haven't quite got my mind wrapped around this little conservaturd. Rising unemployment and declining wages are good for Amurka!?! Yep. Also, down will henceforth be referred to as up.