The Assumption that I Need to Reevaluate my Politics

I'm a card carrying member of the Republican Party. For some reason, I get the impression that many in Outer Blogness seem to think there's something wrong with that. Why? What they object to is unfortunately who seems to have control of the Republican Party at the moment -- the Religious Right.

Republicans ideally should stand for lesser government intervention and as a consequence greater personal freedom, but perhaps I just think that because of my own libertarian leanings, and despite what many people seem to think, it's actually to my finacial advantage as someone who is working poor to support them. The Democrats have not initiated helpful policies in that regard for a long time. Currently, all they seem to be doing is encouraging people to stay in lower brackets to take advantage of programs. Now, for Union members, it's definitely to their financial advantage to support the Democratic party.

It would have been better for such people to say that people should reevaluate their support of the current Bush administration, which is what I think they meant anyway. I've never been a huge fan of the Patriot Act and the Wiretapping thing has me really ticked off. Let's face it, in 2000 Al Gore was an idiot, and Bush wasn't that bright, but in my opinion, George Bush was the better of the two. In 2004 the options were just as bleak, but I'd have to say Kerry probably was smarter. Yet, in the second term it became abundantly clear that Bush had no respect for things like right to privacy or even bothering with the actual law. He could have obtained warrants for the wiretaps, but chose not to for some inexplicable reason. Not to mention, we've gotten bogged down in Iraq, which would not have happened if we'd bring full military power to bear on the region. However, the reasons for the Iraq war were never exactly clear and I always thought it was more of a personal vendetta than any clear ties Iraq had to Al Qaeda.

Not only that, some of the positions of the Bush administration seem to be compounded by George Bush's unwillingness to rectify his own ignorance. Stem cells are a prime example of this. We can obtain them from cloning technology, and his objection seems to come from that these cells are obtained from abortions, but they don't have to be, since I believe we already have a fair number of frozen stem cells in storage. Now, I don't believe it's going to be a magical cure all or that we're even close to seeing results from this, but a complete ban on government funding for it does not make sense since we will eventually see benefits.

The current direction of the Republican Party scares me and I think it's time more reasonable voices took control of it back from its more reactionary fringe.