Liberal or Conservative?

A good friend of mine is mostly liberal, and can't understand why I am a "conservative". I take in strays, I grow my own food, I hate Corporate Welfare as much as social Welfare, I am opposed to a war that kills our young men and women while the rest of us simply go to the mall and pretend that the war doesn't touch us at all. My friend knows that I know that the recruitment of Palin to the McCain campaign was a political tactic worthy of Lee Atwater, nothing more, and that I agree that Palin is a "stalking horse" - the horse used by hunters to preceed them into a herd of deer, hiding behind the horse til they get close enough to slaughter. I don't trust or like McCain. But then again, I don't trust or like Obama. I really despise Biden - so far left of center that he does not even register in peripheral political vision.

The point is, I guess, is my political philosophy is laissez-faire - leave things alone. Government intervention in anything is pretty much a guarantee that something will get screwed up. Too many politicians don't read what is put before them - they depend on their friends or their lobbyists to translate for them and tell them how to vote. They have little to no grasp of what life in the real world is like. They run their lives on getting the vote - not on getting the facts. That goes for all parties and all adherents to parties.

I was a Libertarian for 12 years, and rose rapidly in that party's ranks - but still, their failings are that they know what they want, they simply do not know how to get it, and whine and stomp their feet because they can't. They are as ignorant in the difference in what 'should' be and what 'is' as is a five year old. They will never accomplish anything political, simply because they would rather scream - "That's not how it is supposed to be!" than to figure out ways to change things to what they are supposed to be. They will even ridicule folks who show them how to change things and make a difference - because then they fall back on - "that's too hard; we are educational and Constitutional, not political". A political party that refuses to use the political process to make things happen is useless, a mere soapbox for the frustrated. They would rather say, "I TOLD you so!" and be right, than to make things right.

Back to liberal vs conservative - I simply want the right to make my own choices. If I take in another stray, I want the right to do so - or to choose not to. If I grow my own food organically, I want it to be my choice how it is done, not someone else's. If I make a choice, then I want the right to rise or fall on the merits of that choice - be it a lifestyle choice, a financial choice, or a future-determinate choice, without government involvement or supervision. I don't like bailing out with my hard-earned cash the Savings and Loans, Corporations, Welfare mommies, the idiots who got caught buying more homes than they could afford, or the idiots who are now running up billions of dollars in credit, from the White House to the house down the street, or other countries that have gold in their ambassadors' pockets and a lack of food in their natives' homes. I have the right to rise or fall on my own merits - and so do they. People - all people - should pay their own way. The world owes no one anything for simply existing.

So I am a 'conservative' because I don't feel that government is the answer to all of the country's, or the world's, problems. Unfortunately, most 'compassionate conservatives' and those who use all the other cowardly, half-way appellations and excuses for voting to give more of my money away, don't have the courage to say these things, especially when they are in office or running for higher office. I have found that most people really do want a nanny government, a birth-to-death babysitter that doesn't allow them to fail - or, ultimately, succeed; that treats them as helpless and stupid children, and makes excuses for them when they fall out of their cribs. But that doesn't mean that I do. Their pathetic whiny helplessness is not mine. So as much as I despise McCain - and yes, the manipulation of Palin into the mix - I despise the Obama/Biden camp still more. Both the same bodies, hearts, and souls of the two-headed chimera of nanny government that will swallow us, pocketbooks, flesh, bones, regulations, and all.