Amanda at Pandagon sounds like she's Given Up. It's a great post, read the whole thing. It pretty much summarizes how I feel about conservative politics.

You can make a long list of arguments that are basically bad faith arguments from conservatives.

1. Opposition to abortion rights is about saving babies, not oppressing women. Biggie on this blog, of course, so I won't bother to drag out the long list of examples of how the anti-choice leadership monolithically opposes contraception and advocates a return to female subservience.
   
2. The Iraq War is part of an international effort to stop terrorism. Upon finding out that BushCo deliberately lied about Iraq having WMDs, the ability of any thinking person to think that "terrorism" was anything but a cover story should have evaporated.
   
3. Tax cuts for the wealthy stem from an ideological opposition to "big government". Unlikely, coming from the party that thinks nothing of flushing billions of dollars down the toilet in defense contracts to move cheesecake around Iraq.
   
4. The very existence of opposition to the idea of "big government". Get the fuck off my phone line and out of my bedroom if you actually oppose intrusive government action. Sitting in on phone calls is more damaging to freedom than restarting the WPA, by even Bizarro World measures.
   
5. Christians are "persecuted". This lie comes up any time Christians want to persecute someone and the government or society gets in their way.
   
6. Opposition to universal health care is based in fear of losing "choice". Only believable if you spin until you're dizzy and think that an umbrella organization that touches all doctors would have less doctors on it than an complex HMO that only has half the number of available doctors on it, or having no insurance and no doctors at all is more of a "choice" than having access to all the doctors in a universal plan.
   
7. We want to privatize Social Security to help people! Yeah, to help the very rich who will enjoy the huge redistribution of wealth upward that taking Social Security and spiking everyone's stock prices upwards would result in, so they could liquidate before the market crashed and left the rest of us without retirement savings.

So on and so forth. One could say the entire existence of the right wing noise machine is to endlessly apply lipstick to a pig. There's a lot of hand-wringing on the left about how we just can't spin like they can, but I think the ugly, fundamental problem is that we don't have anything to spin, and that handicaps us, motivation-wise.

We usually use the analogy of the shit sandwich to describe this phenomenon. That the Republican agenda is just a big shit sandwich. Any time a Republican policy is empirically evaluated, tested, etc., it comes up as a failure. Just look at the last 6 years of Republican-dominated government. What exactly have they done correctly? Their entire agenda is just one big shit sandwich, and to distract their constituents, whom they routinely screw via these policies, from the taste of that sandwich they use the wedge issues of abortion, gay marriage, the ten comandments etc. Lipstick on a pig, shit sandwich, we're all talking about the same thing. When people actually experience Republicanism, they can't fail to see that it's a hopeless failure (unless they're willfully obtuse, distracted by gays/abortion/wedge issues or just hopelessly fanatic).

The Give Up effect doesn't even require one to read Give Up blog, of course. All it needs is actual experience with Republican/conservative policy. Such policies are fundamentally flawed, they can not succeed.

In related news, the deficit is projected to be 1.76 trillion dollars over the next decade, 3,400 people died in Iraq last month, a CIA contractor has been convicted for beating an Afghan prisoner to death, and Bush's wiretap program has been determined to be illegal for about a billion different reasons. Add to that:

1. The loss of New Orleans
   
2. a bankruptcy bill designed to screw the poorest of citizens
   
3. 2600 troops lost in a pointless war
   
4. A loss of our nation's credibility worldwide (I think a certain Brit cjust called Bush "crap" - an understatement for sure
   
5. An absence of leadership on the environment and failure to join Kyoto
   
6. Politicized terror alerts - see Keith Olberman's take
   
   
7. Torture committed in the name of the US at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo
   
8. A whole host of crooks and cronies running critical departments in government from FEMA to NASA to EPA to FDA to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to shoplifting presidential advisors.
   
9. The politicization of the FDA in regards to plan B
   
10. The capture of regulatory agencies like the FDA and EPA by industry
    
11. The largest debt in human history
    
12. The failure to adequately armor and supply our troops in combat
    
13. A failure from the start to maintain order in Iraq
    
14. The loss of billions of dollars in war profiteering to their defense contractor pals Halliburton (and KBR)
    
15. Hopelessly failing to address North Korean brinksmanship
    
16. Ignoring terror warnings then refusing to support the 9/11 commission.
    
17. Lying to us about the cost of the war in Iraq, ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and WMDs in Iraq, the preparedeness of Iraqi troops, etc., basically every time they mentioned the words Iraq in a sentence, a lie followed.
    
18. Letting Osama Bin Fucking Laden get away with attacking our country (and instead going to Iraq)
    
19. Leaking information on CIA agents for political payback
    
20. Tax cuts for the wealthy
    
21. Failure to increase the minimum wage (by sticking a poison pill in the bill)
    
22. Failing to control oil/gas prices
    
23. Failing to pass an energy policy
    
24. Failing to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of fuel.
    
25. The unfunded mandate of No Child Left Behind
    
26. The PATRIOT act
    
27. Fearmongering about everything, and in doing so, letting the terrorists win.
    
28. Lying to congress about the cost of the Medicare bill
    
29. Directing NASA expenditures to a stupid mission to Mars and directing focus away from study of the earth and global warming.
    
30. Opposing ES cell research, harming US science and slowing the development of potential therapies for disease.
    
31. Opposing sensible public health measures to fight AIDS and instead pushing abstinence around the world.
    
32. Not fulfilling 15 billion dollar promise to fight AIDS in Africa
    
33. Am I forgetting anything?
    

You start to see why you don't need to argue with conservative management of government. All you have to do is describe it.