Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.

So said Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin's political maxim becomes even more true when your enemies are your friends, as is often the case in politics. It certainly is for me, and earlier tonight a good friend found himself quite unable to conceal his happiness over something I don't consider my fault, but which maybe is.

"The Republicans are getting their comeuppance!" he said.

I'm sure similar arguments are being repeated over numerous drinks in numerous places...

"Reap what they sow," "what goes around comes around," and all the usual-but-true cliches.

And there's truth in it.

But yet, not quite the whole truth. At least, not what my friend thought was the whole truth.

As it turned out, he was talking about the "religious right" getting their comeuppance, which the rest of the Republican Party deserved through a process of conflation. They compromised with, and thereby "enabled" the "religious right." Even if Bush wasn't truly a religious conservative, he supported them while Republicans who should have known better looked the other way.

And now, their tedious and hypocritical morality is coming back to bite them in the ass!

Excuse me while I yawn. Is it really news that many Americans are sick and tired of the so-called "religious right"? I've been there, done that myself. (Ever wonder how I came up with the name for this blog?) Barry Goldwater's "good kick in the ass" has been long overdue, and according to the much-suppressed wisdom of the much-suppressed common man, it should have long ago been delivered by many a "good" American. (Others would argue that George Bush himself is sick of the very people he's deliberately manipulated to believe he's one of; I heard Howard Dean say precisely that!)

But politics is about compromise, and many Republicans have compromised with the "religious right." Hell, I've compromised my worthless principles every time I've voted for a Republican who supported the evil "Drug war," so what the hell is the big effing deal with the religious so-called right? I figure maybe if they don't want to kill me, why should I want to kill them? (Especially when millions and millions want to kill us!)

Compromise is life, stupid!

Does that mean that I am to be punished for the crimes of Foley? Because I "looked the other way" when the religious right was in "ascendancy"?

Hell, after this caper, they'll probably be in full ascendancy, but that sure as hell isn't my fault.

Putting them in by getting the Republicans out is the whole idea, and it makes me sick to think about it, only because I've tried to warn about it in this blog more times than I can count.

What happened in the Foley scandal was that certain elements on the left finally figured out how to get the religious conservatives to do the heavy lifting for them.

The magic is that this requires no effort whatsoever by the religious conservatives. They don't have to do or say anything. It's just momentum that's been accumulated. On all sides.

Religious conservatives have been smarting for the Republican Party to lose, and the left knows that. It makes it easier to tip the scales. All that was needed was something to offend absolutely everyone on a visceral level.

The left finally came up with a losing issue on which to win. It makes no difference whether this is logical, and I don't think I have to address it logically. It's simply accumulated anger that found a catalyst.

Let me state another ugly, plain fact: most Americans (including the hated Nixon's hated "Great Silent Majority") are not religious conservatives, and they never will be. That is not meant as an "attack" on religious conservatives, and people who think it is are in denial. To be divided means to hang separately, as Franklin also said. Atheists and Christians who want to be left alone have common ground whether they hate each other or not.

Politics is the art of compromise though, and the people who compromised with religious conservatives now have to pay. And they'll keep paying, for those who don't compromise hate those who will.

("Death to compromisers!" shrieked the Ayatollah Khalkhali back in 1979.)

I still prefer Franklin.

MORE (10/11/06): A typical example of how this is being spun is this headline -- "Republicans' moral facade stripped off."

But was there really a moral facade?

I thought it was just a compromise.