I caught snippets of the Live Earth concert this weekend. Not enough to offer a solid verdict on the concert as a whole but enough to get annoyed. I watched two songs by Melissa Etheridge and she proved the suspicion in the deep recesses of my cold soul that though I may be a “bad” Republican I can never share my political tent with her. The professional protest singer is as unappealing to me as chlamydia.

She opened her set with a dramatic deep breath – an allusion to the clean air of New Jersey - and then began singing a stupid song about the inarticulate Cindy Sheehan. The song was made worse by the adoring fans, half of them middle-aged women who looked like Cindy Sheehan. I grimaced at the way she dramatized this ridiculous woman’s life into song, positioning her as an American folk hero. When I saw Cindy Sheehan interviewed on the Today Show, in her cut off jeans and dirty T-shirt spewing a moral worldview that I am convinced she got from a bumper sticker, she wasn’t someone who I was rushing out to immortalize in song.

I agree with people like Etheridge, Sheehan, and company on the war, for the most part, but I disagree with their methodology. Contrary to popular myth, the war in Vietnam didn’t end because the hippies marched their smelly bodies on Washington. The war ended because people like my grandparents, the status quo American watching the nightly news, lost faith in their country because they realized that their government was lying to them and they didn’t want to see any more kids killed for a futile experiment in democratization. Sound familiar? The left always hates the President – they are predictably dissatisfied - and they are embarrassed by patriotism. Sheehan and Etheridge only mobilize people who are already committed to their cause (which might be self-righteousness, or maybe, self-loathing – I get them confused) but they turn off people like me.

That’s why people don’t take them seriously. Your average American (Come to Gettysburg in the summer – you’ll see who I mean) feels deeply for our soldiers. The liberal columnists in the Washington Post and New York Times haven’t changed the public mind, but instead, their minds have been changed by the images of amputees trying to learn how to walk again at the dilapidated Walter Reed Medical Center. The political center was lost on this experiment in Iraq when the Administration wasn’t able to answer the question: Why?

This is precisely where we are now. David Brooks, a revered columnist on this site, said yesterday on Meet the Press that the Republican Party as we know it will cease to exist in a few years. For someone as even keeled as Brooks, this was a startling prediction. He was saying that the Party of today is a fractionalized and embittered place and likely to be divided up like a pizza in the coming years. Conservatives get the meatball, libertarians prefer BBQ, lefty moderates like veggie, and Evangelicals get extra cheese – we are a party that can’t agree on one type so we’re all going to order something different and sit in our respective rooms eating alone and watching different news channels.

I, like Gibbon, blame the Evangelicals.

Brooks said that middle-left Republicans, the liberal republican of the 50’s or the Eisenhower Man (a person not unlike this token blogger) has either left the party or is in the process of leaving. We’re attracted to a person like Bloomberg and if we haven’t bolted to become an independent yet, we will likely make the move in the next two years. Though I hope to be a lot of things in two years time (a rodeo clown or a jockey) an Independent isn’t one of them, and becoming a Democrat is certainly not an option. Democrats think Etheridge’s song about Cindy Sheehan is good music. Democrats think the Clintons are gods. Democrats believe that people are fundamentally good. I am no Democrat.

But I am also not much of a Republican either. This is the dilemma.