It's that time again. Election time. We just finished with a Republican primary in my home state for the gubernatorial nomination.

Both candidates promised the usual crap - they will cut taxes AND balance the budget.

How? By cutting spending naturally. And of course giving the "job creators" the keys to the store so they can steal us blind and "trickle down" some of their magic to us.

But mostly the promise is to "cut spending". 

Not just any spending mind you - but "wasteful spending". The term was even highlighted in one of the candidates ads.

How easy. How conveeeeeeeeeenient. How utterly ridiculous.

"I'm going to cut wasteful spending". It's the easiest promise to make in a campaign. And the most bogus.

Notice they never tell you what constitutes "wasteful" spending. And that's by design, because let's face it, everyone has a different definition of what government spending is "wasteful". One person's waste is another person's necessity and all that.

So the candidate doesn't tell you specifically what they will cut. He or she simply tells you they'll cut wasteful spending and leaves the rest to each voter's imagination. And each voter naturally assumes the candidate means the spending that benefits other, less deserving, people. People, who unlike them, haven't earned the government spending that comes their way.

So, the candidate gets to sound resolute and like a tough budget hawk. And not one specific promise has been made. Zero courage is required to come out against "wasteful spending".  Courage would come from defining it - during a campaign.

This past Sunday my wife and I put in a rear appearance at Mass. It wasn't what some might consider a traditional old-fashioned sitting in the pews kinds of Mass.

No, this was a service at an outdoor grotto at a local Shrine here in the northwest corner of Connecticut. Even so, it was still a Mass, with a priest, some singers, communion, offertory, the whole works.

We like going to this particular venue in the summer time. The weather was nice and it's a pretty setting. Plus the priests who do the services at this Shrine tend to stay away from the political and deal mostly with the spiritual side of the religion. The intermingling of the spiritual and the political is what had driven us away from regular attendance at mass at other churches in our area. There was no overt politics associated with this service, but the undertones were there anyway in interesting ways.

By way of context, we probably meet the criteria of "lapsed Catholics". Though technically I can't be a lapsed Catholic. I was raised and confirmed as a Methodist and have never converted to any other religion. Still ever since marriage to my Catholic wife (who attended parochial school through the 8th grade), and raising our sons as Catholics, my adult religious life, such as it is, has been spent attending Catholic services.

That is until some years ago when we just couldn't take it anymore. The steady preaching about the War on Christianity, the War on Christmas, the War against Marriage, the evils of the homosexual agenda, the terrible sin of abortion, got to be more than we could stomach. We stopped going. The last straw was when we attended a service shortly before the 2008 election because our beloved dog was fighting cancer and had survived a surgery. Like many we had made a bargain, "get her through this operation and we'll go to Mass".

The priest stood up there and said the Church would never tell anyone how to vote. He then proceeded to instruct the parishioners on how to evaluate candidates for public office. He basically said when it comes to choosing a candidate, "he/she can be on the right side of the issues of poverty, war and peace, social justice, capital punishment, but if they're on the wrong side of the issues of sex, marriage and abortion, then forget it". Words to that effect anyway. And of course the converse, a candidate could disagree with the Church's teaching on every other subject, but if they had the marriage being between a man and a woman and the abortion issue correct, that was your candidate.

Needless to say this upset us greatly. Since then we have even stopped being "Christmas/Easter Catholics" feeling no compunction to go to services even on those most holy of Christian holidays. Still, especially for my wife, all those years of parochial school and Catholic upbringing does exert a tug on the conscience. So in the summer we tend to make it to the shrine now and then to attend Mass. The recent passing of a good friend's brother probably was the immediate impetus.

So there we were. Now there was nothing political about the Mass itself or the homily. But I did find the bumper stickers on some cars in the parking lot telling. And later when we visited the shrine's gift shop so my wife could buy a sympathy card for our friend, it got even better.

The first sticker that caught my eye as we pulled into the parking lot was one of those "I Love My Wife" bumper stickers. For those who don't know those come from the Promise Keepers. This is a mostly right wing Christian movement of men whose basic tenet is that the general direction of society is anti-marriage, anti-fidelity, anti-family, anti-religion, but in the face of those tremendous pressures these men are not afraid to remain faithful to God, country and spouse and bravely put that on a bumper sticker for the world to see. 

Color me cynical, but if someone feels the need to publicly proclaim they love their wife and put it on a bumper sticker, well if I'm the wife I've got a good lawyer on speed dial.

The second bumper sticker I saw was after we parked the car and were walking out of the parking lot to the service. "Repeal Obamacare" it said. Yes, because as we all know Jesus was all about denying medical coverage to 15 million of your fellow citizens. The fact that many of those who now have coverage thanks to "Obamacare" are poor, working poor or those with pre-existing conditions, just makes it more likely they would draw the condemnation of the Son of God. I guess.

Okay at this point you could make the argument that these were just two cars, two parishioners among hundreds in attendance and not reflective of the mindset or politics of the entire group. A fair enough argument, and for all I know, true. I wouldn't want to generalize and paint everyone at the Mass with the same brush. 

Some good insight into the overall feelings of the shrine and its followers however could be found in the gift shop. My wife went in following the service to buy a sympathy card as noted above. While she perused the selections I scanned the two shelves of books offered for sale that stood nearby. Most of the offerings were religious in theme, but there was one shelf with the tag "Politics". 

On that shelf there was one of Tom Friedman's forgettable tomes about the Earth being flat, hot and crowded. Brilliant. And somehow one of Paul Krugman's books made it on the shelf. I suppose to give a passing nod to fighting poverty and caring about poor people. 

However the following were more representative of the books found on the "Politics" shelf:

• Treason by Ann Coulter
• Going Rogue by Sarah Palin
• Two, count them two, books by Newt Gingrich

The other books by title seemed to point to being about the culture wars. I could feel the love for all of God's people just dripping off the shelf. I pointed the books out to my wife. She was especially upset seeing the Coulter book there. "She is so hateful." Indeed makes you wonder what her book is doing in a shop whose institution supposedly teaches "love thy neighbor".

As the final icing on the cake, as we got in our car and headed out there was a long line of cars making its way slowly down the narrow road from the Shrine to get back to the state road. We were behind a car displaying a bumper sticker identifying the driver as being a "Tea Party Patriot". Of course it was affixed to a Prius, which last I knew was widely ridiculed in conservative circles as the vehicle of liberal elites trying to sell us on that global warming hoax. So at least that person gets some points for some degree of independent thinking.

Again, I don't want to over-simplify and generalize as to the "typical" person attending services these days. Obviously from just the presence of me and my wife it would be dangerous to do so. But when every bumper sticker seen was associated with the politics of the Right, and almost all of the political books on the shelves in the gift shop likewise were from the Right, what conclusion can one draw? 

So yes not everyone going to these services is conservative or right-wing. But people who are conservative and right-wing, and not overflowing with charity toward their fellow humans, certainly feel welcome there.  

Today's installment of GOP projection comes courtesy of long-time conservative columnist, and noted baseball fan,  George Will. His piece apparently was in the Washington Post last Friday, 8/1, but it only hit one of our local papers this morning.

Decades ago Mr. Will was actually a columnist worth reading even if you rarely agreed with him. He was articulate and thoughtful. Even if you didn't reach the same conclusion he did, at the least he made you think. And more often than not he approached an issue from an angle that made you believe he was a decent and caring human being.

Unfortunately as he fights to remain relevant in the modern world of knee-jerk radical right wing punditry that has become the modern conservative movement, Mr. Will has descended to their level rather than attempting to elevate the discussion.

Case in point is the article noted above. Instead of thoughtful analysis we find just another conservative attempting to define and describe modern progressive politics. And in so doing we find them merely projecting their own partisan biases.

Will's main thesis is that Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a champion for progressive causes in the U.S. Senate, should be a major contender being talked about for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination. The fact the he is not, and that the only two people prominently mentioned are Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, can only mean one thing to the inquiring mind of George Will. It can only mean that Senator Brown is falling victim to that old bugaboo of the modern Left, identity politics.

He basically states the liberal wing of the Democratic party will never support a white male again for President. His version of "once you go black, you never go back" I suppose. No, in George's fevered imagination, you better be a woman, or black, or Latino, or a one-armed lesbian raised by same-sex, endangered wolves, or who knows what, if you want to be the Democratic Presidential candidate.

Of course as pointed out by saner types such as Dave Weigel in Slate, the more realistic explanation could be that Senator Brown has expressed zero interest in running for President, nor made any moves to even explore such as effort or put together an organization needed to take on such a challenge. Of course for that matter neither has Senator Warren who has steadfastly stated she will not run for President in 2016.

But why let pesky facts get in the way when instead you can repeat your prejudices about what progressives believe in and stand for?

And as Weigel also points out in his article, Will has been all too willing in recent columns over the last few months to play the identity politics card when it suits his purpose. He loves highlighting GOP candidates who are women or from more recent immigrant backgrounds. He then delights in dreaming about what impact their success might have on the Democrats claims that the Republicans are conducting a "war on women", or are somehow "anti-immgrant". 

God only knows where Democrats get such crazy notions. George Will can't figure it out either. So he can only conclude it is their slavish devotion to identity politics.