Why can't we be friends?

Tonight is the second part of a two-night Dancing With The Stars finale.  Donald Driver will probably win, because he is a good dancer, and his freestyle last night was just that awesome.

Next season is the long awaited all-star season.  Tom Bergeron has said that the participants will be a mix of former champions, former runners-up, fan favorites, and controversial contestants.

By "controversial," they could mean Kate Gosselin.  She tried to get her professional partner, Tony Dovolani, fired from the show.  He probably would have been relieved to be done with her, and gone off to do toothpaste commercials or something.  But asking for someone's head on a platter is surely not a good way to nurture a dance partnership.

It is far more likely, though, that "controversial" is code for Tom DeLay and Bristol Palin.

The last song Tom DeLay danced to before he was forced to withdraw from the competition due to stress fractures in both feet was Why Can't We Be Friends?  It was a fun, and funny, samba that featured him with a sparkly elephant on his costume, and his professional partner Cheryl Burke had a donkey on hers.

When the pairings were announced, everyone was moaning, "Poor Cheryl.  She's so in favor of gay rights, and she has to dance with that Republican *fill in the blank*."  The "official" ABC message board was a sea of hate.  You'd think she had been asked to dance with Ted Bundy or something.  She made a statement on her website saying that she and Tom DeLay shared a lot of similar values, such as believing in strong families, and she was happy to have such a hard-working partner.  That made perfect sense to me, but certain people kept insisting that she was miserable, and the show forced her to make a positive comment about Tom DeLay.

Uh huh.  Right.  It could never EVER be that Cheryl leaves her politics at the door of the dance studio, and that she and her dance partner actually DID have something in common, and were friends.

In an amusing social media twist, Bruce Hough, the father of two-time champion Julianne Hough and three-time champion Derek Hough, tweeted that he was excited about meeting Tom DeLay, because he is very active in Utah's Republican scene.  You'd think he had tweeted that he eats kittens for breakfast by the way DeLay's detractors reacted.

All of that was child's play compared to the Bristol Palin dance-a-thon.  I say dance-a-thon because she made the finals.  As a power-voter, I was one of the people who helped get her there.  Why?  Because I liked her dancing.  And yes, I like her mom.  That truly has nothing to do with why I power-voted for Bristol, though.

The ugliness surpassed anything before or since, and I didn't get it.  I believe Bristol Palin's message to be a positive one.  Even with the advantage of parents who were wealthy and supportive, and all the opportunities she created on her own, being a single teenage mother isn't a whole lot of fun.  She doesn't regret her son, but she regrets having to grow up so fast.  And her point is that if someone with every advantage struggles with the situation, what is someone with no advantages going to do?  Duh.  Struggle even more.

She got called a big fat hypocrite, and worse.  We got to hear about "poor Mark Ballas."  Yeah, poor Mark.  I'm sure it really blows to make it to the finals with a beautiful, enthusiastic partner.

I don't know what Mark Ballas' politics are.  His mother is British, but his paternal grandfather invented the Weedeater.  Inventors tend to be capitalists and fiscal conservatives.  Either way, a professional dancer has never been known to contract a fatal disease from dancing with a conservative.  The partners of Bristol Palin, Tom DeLay, Kathy Ireland, Sara Evans, Kurt Warner, and every other self-identified conservative who's ever appeared on Dancing With The Stars are still amongst the quick.

I guess "conservative cooties" are a myth, like Bigfoot, Nessie, and "reasonable" gun control.

Anyway, the answer to that song Tom DeLay performed his samba to, "Why can't we be friends?" is, we can, if you "progressives" or whatever you're calling yourselves these days stop being such jerks.

Sure, there's plenty of lashing out to go around.  The lashing out against conservatives, though, often is so baseless as to be laughable.

George W. Bush got attacked for everything from his ears to his intelligence.  Tell you what, sugarplum.  Let's put you in a jet and send you on your way.  If you come back alive, you can then comment on whether W is smart or not.  I also like, "Bush is responsible for the chaos in the housing industry that led to the collapse of the economy."  Surely it couldn't have been Democrat policies, dating back to Jimmy Carter, that required banks to loan money to anyone who could fog a mirror, irrespective of whether they could or would pay it back.  And so on and so on and so on.  Bush lied, people died, and all that.  (In an excercise in proving that karma is real, Molly Ivins always referred to Bush The Younger as "Shrub," and she got planted six feet underneath one.)

The way Sarah Palin, and her whole family, have been treated is so mean-spirited that you wonder if some of the attackers are even sane.  She took the rap for a line about Russia in a comedy skit by some woman named Tina.  There was speculation that her youngest child was actually Bristol's son, a biological impossibility unless we are watching an episode of Star Trek, where the Betazoid produces a kid in about a week.  She was even blamed for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.  No, it couldn't be that Gabby declined to have her staff coordinate with local law enforcement at her public appearances and/or have her staff armed themselves.  It HAD to be something Sarah Palin did.

There are many more targets of Liberal Insanity Disorder.  (LID just might be my new favorite acronym, since it puts me in mind of the colorful phase "flipping your lid.")  Unfortunately, listing all the perpetrators of LID would probably break the internet or something.  And the finale of Dancing With The Stars, which inspired this whole thing, is starting soon.  So I must sum up briefly.

Yeah, we can be friends.  Just get in touch with reality, stop lying, stop picking on people of faith, and realize that your liberal "answers" have created far more problems than they will ever solve.  Then we'll get along fine.  I won't be holding my breath for that change to happen, any more than I expect Tom or Bristol to be welcomed back if they are selected for the all-star season.

Wow.  Who knew that Dancing With The Stars was a metaphor for real everyday life?