For my whole pathetic and heretofore wasted life I’ve been a bleeding-heart pinko liberal.

Lamentable, I know, but understand that the deluded hypocrisy of the Democratic Party is in my genes. I’m not proud and I am trying to change.

You see, I grew up in the household of a single mother; my father was a foreigner who left our family in typical liberal fashion — at the first sign of responsibility.

From that moment until this one, more than 21 years later, my leftism was entrenched. I even dreamed sometimes of smoking cigars with Bill Clinton or driving on bridges with Ted Kennedy.

As I grew up — unbaptised, of course — I became active in various liberal movements and secret communist organizations. For my eighth birthday I asked my mother for a membership in the American Civil Liberties Union; at my birthday party I invited only friends who accurately reflected the racial, religious and sexual-preference makeup of the United States. In the following years, I joined the whole alphabet of left-wing propaganda fronts — the ADL, ASPCA, ALF, ELF, GMHC, Greenpeace, NARAL, NOW, NRDC, NAACP, PETA and the Screen Actors Guild.

In junior high I went vegan and spent my weekends liberating animals on farms surrounding my hometown. Around that time I also began wearing hemp products, and smoking some too.

In high school I lobbied for increased sex education and personally distributed copies of the Kama Sutra to classmates. As a junior, I was named Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Promoter of the Year for Eastern Kansas. In the summers, I started small businesses for the sole purpose of hiring white employees, firing them and replacing them with less-qualified minorities. One summer, I had a portrait of Che Guevara tattooed on my shoulder.

My first years of college were consumed with ingratiating myself to similar-minded pinko professors and making up lies about the president. I personally marched in 77 protests leading up to the war in Iraq, chanting “Hell no we won’t go,” until I went hoarse. I missed a month of school my freshman year because I sealed myself in a 55-gallon drum and attempted to roll to Washington in protest of our “war for oil.” Just last November I applied for Canadian citizenship and got another tattoo, this one reading “I [heart] activist judges.”

But something has changed in me. I don’t know what has prompted it — the martyrdom of Terri Schiavo or the passion of William Rehnquist, perhaps — but I feel myself starting to believe in evangelical legislation, exploitative business practices and imperialist foreign policy. I feel myself becoming conservative.

All the things I once abhorred now seem righteous. After all, this is America, God bless it, and it’s my duty as an educated male who can pass for white to stifle the rights of those with whom I look different or disagree. Screw the poor, those lazy welfare-check-cashing bastards! Let’s abolish taxes, especially on the rich! The terrorists are out to destroy our capitalist utopia, and if we don’t start seriously cutting back civil liberties and human rights, who knows what they’ll do next.

My respect for President Bush has grown astronomically of late, as I’ve come to appreciate his policy of pre-emptive strikes against non-threatening countries while allowing truly threatening states to freely build up weapons. My very heart goes pitter-pat with each aphorism he flubs, lie he tells and fact he ignores. And I especially love when he manipulates his flock of unquestioning Christian sheep for the political and financial gain of his cronies.

Yes, from now on, I will be a dedicated foot soldier for the wacko religious right and power-hungry military-industrial complex. I’m going to use high-interest credit cards to buy the biggest sport utility vehicle I can find, then I’m going to paint it red, white and blue, fix to it as many yellow-ribbon stickers as I can and barnstorm the US of A in the name of God, gas, guns and a gay marriage ban.

To hide my liberal past, I’ll add “conservative” to my judges tattoo and tell people the swarthy, bearded man on my shoulder is supposed to be Jesus.