Introducing “Preaching to the Choir”

Hi, I’m Rick Hatch, and this is my first blog post ever.

Yeah, I’m late to the game, but I really intended to be later.

You see, I intend to entertain and inform you with a few blogs on different topics that interest me, and I meant to kind of coordinate and pre-plan their launches. And I most definitely wasn’t planning on starting with my most controversial one, the very opinionated and ideological one on politics.

But there’s this pesky little thing coming up called an election. And it just so happened that I couldn’t help myself and sort of wrote something. And this thing I wrote, the entertainment value of it kinda expires after election day. So I’m sorta stuck with working overtime to publish it.

But that will be my second blog post ever.

I’ve chosen the title “Preaching to the Choir” for this blog for a handful of reasons. I like metaphors. I have an evangelical Christian background. But mostly I’m tired of writing good stuff for poor audiences. I don’t require that my audience agrees with everything I write, but I’m looking for at least one group of people to write for who will have an open mind and not reject everything I write out of hand. So I only require that you agree with some of what I write. :-)

The subtitle/description for “Preaching to the Choir” is “The political blog of shallow humor and deep, original thought, for conservatives only.”

My primary goal is to entertain you so that you’ll keep coming back for more. But beyond that, I hope to inform you and to provoke you to think a lot—maybe to look at some things in a slightly different way than you did before. Even though there are lots of conservative voices out there, most of them are saying the same things most of the time. For some reason, even though I share their general outlook, I often view things slightly differently, so expect some original thoughts and ideas that you've only seen or heard discussed rarely, if at all.

This blog will mostly be about politics, political analysis, current events, national and international issues, and that sort of thing.

Humor is subjective. I have no idea whether or not you will find my humor to be shallow, but being modest about my humor-level helps me get away with bold claims about my thought-level. (And sometimes it really is shallow. I’ve laughed at fart jokes. Though I can assure you I have no plans to include fart jokes within this blog, providing this parenthetical comment doesn’t count.)

Now we come to the part about “for conservatives only.” I’m sure we’ve got a few non-conservatives who have made it this far, so conservatives, you can skip to the section below with the “>>>Conservatives” marker to show you where I’m back with you again, while I speak directly to the dissidents.

Liberals:

I'm not even slightly interested in arguing with you here. You're not the intended audience for these posts, you won't enjoy them, and my audience isn't here to hear from you. I won’t publish your comments. So please go away and let us make fun of you behind your backs, and eventually I plan to have a separate blog where you will be welcome to tell me how stupid and bigoted I am, and how much you hate me and every other conservative in the world.

If you absolutely must stay and lurk, then I request that you kindly fume silently and refrain from tracking me down with death threats and whatnot. As I write this there are probably a couple million, or at least thousands upon thousands, of conservatives with far more power and influence than I have. Even if this blog is successful beyond my wildest dreams, odds are extremely good that there will still be hundreds upon hundreds of conservatives with far more power and influence than I have. So you see, going to all the trouble of killing me would really be a waste of your time, what with so many better targets out there and all.

Libertarians:

We won't agree on everything, but we'll agree on a lot, and best of all, you guys usually play nice. So you're very welcome here.

>>>Conservatives:

This blog may not be right for some of you, too. Every now and then, I may get a teeny bit brutal when I mock the left, even though I’m generally not a horrible person and wouldn’t mock a person’s beliefs like that to his face. See, now you know why I need a space “for conservatives only.” Anyhow, if that kind of passive-aggression makes you uncomfortable, this probably isn’t the blog for you. On the other hand, if you giggle because you’ve secretly been thinking exactly what I just said, welcome!

This blog also may not be for you if you’re a person who is easily offended. Some issues in our world today involve things like human sexuality or the horrors of violence, and if I write about those issues, I won’t be sugar-coating what I write. I don’t anticipate using R-rated language myself, but I don’t plan to censor reader comments unless they’re really over the top. I’m not offended by rare use of a bad word for comedic effect or dramatic emphasis, and might possibly even do it myself if it seems like the only way I can communicate something the way I want to, but only very, very rarely.

As a guideline for those of you to whom this is useful, my favorite television show is Fox’s “RedEye with Greg Gutfeld.” I love its wit, its humor, and sometimes its sheer brilliance. But at times it comes really close to being too over the top for me. If you love that show, I hope you’ll find some of that same wit, humor and sheer brilliance here, even though I might not have as much “edge” as that show. If you find that show completely repulsive and offensive, you probably wouldn’t find my blog to be quite so bad, but you’re not likely to fall in love with my blog either. If you’re like me and enjoy Red Eye even though it sometimes crosses your own personal line between good and bad taste, then I suspect you may enjoy my blog and that it will cross that line less frequently than Red Eye does.

Oh, so parents, the above two paragraphs also mean that this blog is for you, not for your kids. If you think this blog is appropriate for your very mature teenager, that’s your call, but these days I question the maturity of most college kids, let alone teenagers. (No offense intended to my anticipated hundreds of extremely-mature college-age readers!)

OK, I hope that covers everything.  Here goes nothing.