New Orleans    There are a lot of things that conservatives are worried about these days, and it turns out the list is unimaginably long. It’s not just whether or not uppity abortion crazed family-hating women, same-sexers, Mexicans, African-Americans, and anyone with a tan or wearing an ACORN button might in some sneaky way take over the country and try in our warped way to make it better, but there are other new and old forces joining to do the same.

Here’s a new one to me: social leftists. In Music City, Nashville, Tennessee, a hedge fund bond daddy is running for Mayor on the Republican side and a current council member at large, a Democratic woman is running on the Democratic side. In an irony almost so rich that it falls in the “truth is stranger than fiction” category, the wife of the super one-hundredth of a one-percenter put out an ad warning people not to vote for the Democrat because she was a “social leftist” and of course if elected would impose all of those social leftist things on the fine, upstanding people of Nashville, Tennessee.

What in the world is “social leftism,” you and I might ask? I’m pretty much clueless, but Mrs. One-Hundredth of One Percent, seemed to think that advocating for a higher minimum wage was definitely one of the planks that those social leftists would stand on most firmly. A reporter wagged that Nashville wasn’t used to this kind of roughshod politics and it was reminiscent of the spite song on country radio some years back where they sang, “You’re the Reason Our Children Are So Ugly.”

Where do we join that movement?

Then I read something that was, if anything, even weirder. There’s an infamous case in the Louisiana criminal injustice system currently where they have held a 68-year old African-American inmate on a 43-year old prison murder where his conviction has been thrown out in two separate trials and by the federal appeals court. While this is going on, Albert Woodfox has been kept in solitary confinement or what Angola Prison Warden Burl Cain calls euphemistically “closed-cell restriction” for 23 hours per day. Why, “because he could influence young inmates by spreading Black Pantherism if released into the general population. Cain says, “I wouldn’t let a Ku Klux Klan member come here to organize. I also wouldn’t let anyone organize a Black Panther Party of (his) cell.”

Black Pantherism? What in the world is that? How 20th century can you get? When was the last sighting of a Black Panther? 1975, 40 years ago? I thought panthers in most of the country were extinct? Looking for “black pantherism” would be a lot like looking for the yeti or the abdominal snowman or something like that.

It’s a mystery. Here’s an idea for how to do all of this. In the modern world of social networking where you can connect everybody to everybody somehow, let’s hook Warden Cain up with Mrs. One-Hundredth of One-Percent and have them join forces so that they can find and identify these “social leftists” and all of that “black pantherism.” Both of them seem to not care whether they make any sense whatsoever once they open their mouths, so I’m confident if they find these things, they’ll tell us all about it, and we can either help them root it out, or join these new movements with pride.

It was probably so much easier for the rightwing when all they had to do was call someone a pinko, red-Commie, and call it day.