This has never been a politically-oriented blog, but I just wanted to take a moment to urge those readers who care about such things to muster up all that energy for mockery and contempt, and redirect it, for the good of the country and the Republican Party.

Just about everyone who follows politics closely (which I have done at some periods of my life, though not so much in the present) feels a need to vent negative energy once in awhile. Some pundits hardly do anything else – which is probably unhealthy – but politics is a game that needs its villains as well as its heroes, and politicians provide such excellent material for the satirical eye that it would be all but impossible not to take some shots.

The most natural target for conservatives at present is, of course, Hillary Clinton. It could hardly get easier. She has a long and somewhat tawdry history that includes among its low points her health care fiasco (which is even more humorous since she was not actually an elected politician at the time when she tried to spearhead that failed effort) and the fact that she is the wife of a former president who is best remembered for being impeached and giving all-new meaning to the term “public scandal.” Even more humorously, her high points include writing a book called It Takes a Village (to raise ONE child, evidently) and becoming the senator of a state with which she had no previous connection at all. She clothes herself in the “power female” image that drives conservative men nuts and brings out the catty instincts of conservative females (no disrespect here – I know the latter impulses from experience.) And she’s always saying ridiculous things like “Abortion should be safe, legal and NEVER” (before going on to explain how improving welfare and social services will actually be the most effective way to end abortion… um, yeah.)

It’s… so… easy. But I’m here to beg our conservative readers to redirect all that negative energy away from Hillary Clinton… and towards Rudy Giuliani.

The right needs to be veeeeery careful in its handling of Hillary Clinton as we move towards the next election, from the bar room to the blog to the political stump speech. She is exactly the person to bring out every ugly feeling conservatives have ever had about women politicians… and this is exactly what she wants. If the right indulges its intense desire to heap scorn upon her head, we might as well all start bidding for the job of redecorating the Oval Office in her favorite colors. Moderates will go scurrying into her camp like lemmings if conservatives poison the well with the appearance of misogyny. This will be hard for many of us, because she seems to us so obviously a ludicrous figure; how could anyone not see it? Bite your lip, bite your knuckles, or pull a bag over your head until the mood passes, because the fact is not everyone sees her this way and if we let her turn this next election into a de facto decision between being pro-woman and anti-woman, Hillary will win.

Then there’s Giuliani. Though every politician has his ridiculous side, Giuliani is not one of the easier ones to ridicule. His persona commands respect. Hillary made her appearance on the national political scene by flubbing the health care effort; Giuliani made his by handling the greatest crisis in America’s recent history with poise and authority. He is articulate and he projects confidence, intelligence, and charm. There’s a reason why he’s steadily gaining in popularity, according to opinion polls.

But he’s also pro-abortion, and not just nominally so. It might be worth debating whether we could live with a candidate who was personally pro-abortion but who made it clear that he was willing to set those views aside in the interests of the party. But Giuliani is not such a candidate. Just this week when we’re all celebrating great news on the abortion front from the Supreme Court, Giuliani came out swinging with statements about women having a “right” to taxpayer-funded abortions. Perhaps even worse, he made a statement to an Iowa newspaper telling Republicans that they need to “get beyond issues like that.”

It’s clear that, for any faithful Catholic, Giuliani is not an acceptable choice. He doesn’t just privately disagree with the Republican position on abortion. He sees it as a real weakness in his party’s traditional platform, a thorn in the Republican side. Giuliani will make this next election a test of how much the Republican party really cares about abortion. I assume that most of our readers, like me, care a lot more about abortion than about the Republicans – that is to say, if withdrawing support from the Republicans over the abortion issue puts the Republicans into the gutter, I’m okay with that. We might suffer for a little under ugly liberal Democratic regimes, but eventually there would be some kind of party realignment. There is too much anti-abortion sentiment in America for it to fail to find political voice one way or another, if we insist on keeping it on the table. So the choice seems pretty clear: we have to do what we can to sink Giuliani, even if that means (as I think is fairly likely anyway) that the Democrats win the next election.

Presumably his gamble is that he might be able to win an election without the help of social conservatives, by pulling in the moderate and independent voters who might be attracted to his joining of conservative fiscal and international policies with liberal social values. (Think of the appeal of The Economist which has a somewhat similar sort of mixture.) But first he has to win the primaries. So now, if ever, is the time to make our attitudes clear. If the Giuliani campaign can be sufficiently demoralized and discredited by the furor of angry conservatives, this might be enough to destroy his hopes of getting through the primaries. People who care about abortion need to be reminded that his other charms do not make up for this grave deficiency. And conservatives who don’t care that much about abortion need to be brought to question whether Giuliani would have a real chance of winning the election (since the pragmatic consideration “can he win?” is always at the front of people’s minds in a primary election.) So start working on your Giuliani parodies! There’s a productive end to which one’s conservative political angst could be put, if the desire to trash Hillary starts to become overwhelming.

Next up: learning to love John McCain?