Setting the Record Straight: Conservative Values
Originally Posted on October 10th, 2007:
“The refusal to do assets tests on federal health insurance programs is why federal entitlements are exploding and government keeps expanding. If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.” — Michelle Malkin, blogger, as quoted in this New York Times article.
If that were the case, the Republicans deserved to lose their seats long ago. I’m not going to comment on the article, though it illustrates modern conservatives perfectly. Instead, I’m going to talk about my beef with the above statement.
For many years, the fundamental tenet of American conservative ideology has been small government. Back when I didn’t know much about politics and happened to be a staunch conservative (two conditions which I suspect are related), the mantra had always been “less government, more freedom.” What was the source of this unchecked government expansionism? Why, it was the liberals! The liberals were there to dictate your lives, tell you what is and is not moral, tell you how you should spend your money and make you feel bad for being an American! The right to privacy; that was the conservative way. The liberals, on the other hand, were the ones who wanted to know where you were and what you were doing at all times, or so we were told. In the 1990’s it was they who wanted to police the world, not the self-proclaimed “constitutionally grounded” conservatives.
The whole conservative “movement” marched to the beat of keeping government out of our homes, out of our lives, out of our checkbooks and out of our business. Especially those damn liberals.
But then again…: Conservatives on Privacy.
It is well known how conservatives fought to let the government in our bedrooms to tell us what we can and cannot do in the most private of situations with anti-sodomy laws. (Sodomy, in case you were wondering, has been defined by the law as anything from masturbation to oral or anal sex between straight or gay couples.) This has been going on for decades.
There are more recent examples. On December 19th, 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confirmed the existence of an NSA domestic wiretapping program which did not seek to obtain the necessary warrants as required by 50 U.S.C. sect;1802 (a)(1)(A) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. (consequentially, it is not surprising that they’re also not enforcing 50 U.S.C. §1809 as a result).
I’m not even going to get into the “Real ID” and the hypocrisy of conservatives who complain about the “liberal” government wanting to know everything you’re doing.
I guess that throws conservative privacy out the window. It is selective at best.
It’s only wrong when the other side does it: Conservatives on Big Government.
Less than two months after the events of 9/11/2001, President Bush signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act, which has increased the powers of the government exponentially.
Meanwhile, the only part of the act President Bush repeatedly mentions is Section 203 or Title VII, which allows for increased sharing of information between law enforcement agencies. He leaves out the parts about granting the government the authority to seize property at its discretion in times of war (Section 106), the addition of judges in Washington (Section 208), the liabilities for unauthorized intelligence disclosures (Section 223), of which many have either been leaked from the white house or other high officials, or the apparent selective suspension of habeas corpus.
How convenient.
Additionally, they’ve created the Department of Homeland Security which, according to wikipedia, is the third largest U.S. government entity. One must question how this supports the idea of small government. With what so-called conservatives have supported in the last 6 years, they have absolutely no credibility when criticizing even a perceived expansion of government, nor government spending.
We’re saving them from themselves: Conservatives on Foreign Policy.
Afghanistan is justifiable, regardless of the long history of bad foreign policy that got us to this point. Iraq, however, was based on a lie told to us by a shady Iraqi defector, yet was presented to the world as strong intelligence supporting the claim that Iraq was not only in possession of weapons of mass destruction, but had a massive program in which it was continuing to produce them. With that, we invaded a country, unprovoked, and found out that what the vast majority of the intelligence community already knew: there were no WMD’s.
After that, we tried drawing connections between Iraq and 9/11, then to international terrorism, even though Iraq was not a fundamentalist state and simply did not have terrorists or a terrorism problem prior to the U.S. invasion. Even after such a claim was thoroughly debunked and the government admitted there was no link between them, the Bush administration and conservative journalists continued to propagate the lie. Why?
So instead we poised ourselves as liberators of a country that, while having a despotic ruler, were not occupied and did not ask to be liberated. Seems any excuse will do, won’t it? I won’t spin my web of theories as to what the horribly obvious ulterior motives might be, but if this doesn’t fall into the category of “policing the world,” nothing does.
The conservative response? They’re protecting us from the terrorists. Bring that up the next time one of them criticizes liberals for “wanting the government to take care of everything for you.” The blogger quoted above says providing healthcare for children brings a sense of entitlement? What part of the conservative-inspired belligerent American nationalism and the subsequent claims such as driving a gigantic gas-guzzling SUV as your god-given right (or something similarly petty) doesn’t reek of entitlement?
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I’m just incredulous. Why do people continue to fall for this? Conservatives decry liberals for being in favor of big government, yet cheer the Bush administration for creating the DoHS! We already had agencies that took care of this, namely the INS, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DoJ and police forces, and the National Guard. How can so-called conservatives chide liberals (or anyone who disagrees with them and is therefor labeled a liberal, regardless of their actual political alignment) for creating a never-ending bureaucracy when they have done exactly that.
Conservatives consistently deride the left for wanting to police the world, yet we are now in two unprovoked wars: Afghanistan, as a result of crimes allegedly committed by Saudi Arabian nationals; and Iraq, which, with what we know now, can not be justified as anything greater than a war of opportunism and profiteering! At least in Bill Clinton’s time, we invaded foreign countries who were committing atrocious crimes against humanity. Whether you think we should have partaken or not, no one can argue the comparative altruism to the gravely mis-titled War on Terror.
Not all conservatives can be this dense. If only they would look at what they claim to believe in and compare it to what they’ve supported. Would the two correlate with each other? Not likely. Could they really all be sheep that unquestioningly support whatever the Republican party is doing? Do they listen to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly to know what to think? How is it possible that all these people–or any group, for that matter–can be unified on every single issue? When I see that all these people from all different backgrounds have the exact same opinion about every topic, it is impossible for me not to question whether any of them think at all. That goes for Democrats and so-called “free-thinking” liberals, too.
To sum it up: Conservatives, you’ve lost your credibility and moral authority. Start supporting legislation and policies that correlate with what you claim to believe in or shut up and stop making everyone dumber by spreading bullshit. Some of you may need to re-evaluate your entire political philosophy, as I had to do when faced with the eventual disillusionment that comes with discoveries of learning. This is not easy to do, and most of you won’t bother because it is easier to be told what to think instead of figuring it out yourself. For this, I pity you and mourn your independence. For those of you who do know what’s going on yet deliberately piss in the proverbial pool, congratulations; you are successfully destroying America.
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I’m aware that the average person, conservative or not, really doesn’t pay much attention to politics. That doesn’t necessarily make them dumb for their views. The problem is that even though many don’t bother with politics, they still carry the power to vote, and that scares the hell out of me.
The point of this blog, in a nutshell? I’m not particularly anti-Conservative or anti-Republican. I’m anti-bullshit. Next time I’ll talk about some other bullshit that has been bothering me for ages: the lie that America is–or ever was–a Christian nation, and the exploitation of religion as a political tool. See you next time.