Politics is getting nastier because whites are getting the dim realization that what is now at stake is more than their looking sweet.

Lefist politics were always nasty. But politics only “got nasty” when people started getting nasty back.

Leftists were allowed to pull every dirty trick in the book and to say anything they wanted to about anybody. On the other side, moderates kept the conservatives in line.

Leftists could declare that every child in America was starving, and moderates would tell them what idealists they were and suggest softly that maybe only half the country’s children were starving.

But those sugar-sweet moderates were vicious when they fought conservatives. At every Republican convention conservatives were savaged and excluded.

In 1988, when Bush Senior took over, he had Reagan and one or two others speaking to the convention one night, and then his chief of staff said, “Thank God we got the conservatives out of the way!”

In 1989, one Bush operative bragged, “I was the first to clean all the Reaganites out of my department!”

As always, the conservatives mostly just grovelled at Bush’s feet.

It was even worse before Reagan. Conservatives at conventions were treated like dogs. A friend of mine put it perfectly:

“Every four years conservative Republicans get kicked in the teeth and come up smiling.”

Respectable conservatives now grovel at the fet of neoconservatives. But you have to give the neos this, they are not like moderates. When they fight on an issue they care about, like the fate of Israel, they go for the throat.

The media loved the moderates. The media hates the neos.

The media thought politics was very gentlemanly when only the Abbie Hoffmans and Ted Kennedys got to do the shouting and insulting and pull the dirty tricks.

The reason we hear that politics is getting nasty is because today the liberals are getting kicked, too.

Gay marriage and all the other liberal initiatives got tromped around the country.

Only one so-called “progressive” initiative passed overwhelmingly in California. Embryonic stem cell research.

California is not typical. But this was lopsided. This was out of sight. Governor Schwarzenegger backed it big time because he had to, though I have no doubt he is for it.

When embryonic stem cell research is brought up, people are told to believe that a fertilized egg is the same thing as a someone’s child. If you asked most of those people, “Does life begin at conception?” they would say “Yes.”

If all men are truly created equal then that fertilized egg you can see only under a microscope is exactly the same as a child you see playing in the grass. If you had a choice between letting a child die or letting two ferilized ova be destroyed, you would save the fetuses.

Nobody believes that. Well, almost nobody. But anybody who REALLY believes that is regarded by others as a nut. It’s a fine theory but it doesn’t really mean a thing.

It’s like evolution. A lot of people see evolution has holes in it. If you say the earth and all the life on it came into being at once, everybody will say how much they respect your point of view.

They don’t.

They’re humoring you.

No one who would actually save two fertilized eggs over a child will ever be elected to national office. Bush says he takes that proposition seriously, but everybody knows he doesn’t.

Anti-evolutionists and pro-lifers will have to define themselves out of the nutcase category and distance themselves from the crazies before they can win any serious political battle.