What is most infuriating about the Busheviks is their insistence that they are "conservative" when they are nothing of the sort. But then, this is typical of the Busheviks. When presented with facts, they stare at you with doe-eyed astonishment, then attack you as some kind of liberal Commie.
A true conservative is one who does not embark upon change for the sake of change. He is concerned about managing change, about making only those limited changes needed in order to perfect society. A true conservative hates change, and embarks upon change only when it is demonstrably needed, and only to the extent necessary to resolve the problem. A true conservative will, if possible, adopt only those changes that have been proven in the crucible of time, rather than untested, unproven changes.
Thus a true conservative, confronted with, e.g., the notion of school vouchers as a replacement for public schooling, rejects them immediately. A true conservative notes that all of our competitors who perform better in international comparisons of schooling do so using public school systems, and thus the proper, conservative thing to do is to examine those competitors, detirmine what they are doing right, and then adopt only those changes which said competitors have proven to work. The notion of completely dismantling the U.S. K-12 educational system in favor of some untested, untried system like vouchers makes true conservatives blanche. Yet Busheviks, like Communists, believe that an untried system ought to be put into place because, well, their ideology calls for it. That is not conservative, no more than Lenin was.
Similarly, true conservatives believe in fiscal responsibility. You don't spend more than you make. The notion that "Deficits don't matter" makes true conservatives nauseous. Busheviks, on the other hand, have no trouble with the notion of "borrow now, pay later (maybe)", having run up trillions of dollars in debt already during the regime of their Dear Leader.
Finally, true conservatives base their judgements upon reality, not upon ideology. For example, Bushevik ideology states, "low taxes good, high taxes bad." So ask them why aren't they moving to Mexico, whose taxes are half those of the United States, if low taxes creates a business paradise? They'll hem and haw and allow that it's because Mexico is a corrupt cesspool lacking public safety, public infrastructure, protection for private property rights, and decent schools. Then hammer them with statistics showing that if you graph percent of GNP collected as taxes vs. economic growth, the highest economic growth isn't over there on the left ("low tax") side -- those countries are virtually *all* corrupt cesspools lacking public safety, public infrastructure, protection for private property rights, and decent schools. Similarly, the highest economic growth isn't over there on the right ("high tax") side either. Rather, it's right in the middle. In fact, if you graph tax collections vs. economic growth, what you see is an inverted U, with the highest economic growth in the middle, and you also see that the United States is dangerously close to falling off the left side (low tax side) of that inverted U -- which would tend to imply that the United States is on the verge of becoming a corrupt cesspool lacking public safety, public infrastructure, protection for private property rights, and schools capable of creating an educated workforce. The conservative response, looking at that and at the current accounts deficit, would be to raise taxes enough to maintain the public infrastructure needed for honest governance and keep from going into debt, without veering over to the right (high tax) side of that inverted U. The Bushevik response is a blank stare and then, "You must be a Democrat, no wonder you don't win elections, since you believe in high taxes!"
The fact of the matter is that the Busheviks are not conservative, not in any way that the late Barry Goldwater would recognize anyhow. Busheviks are about as "conservative" as Communists. Both the Busheviks and the Communists are all about ideology, not reality. Both the Busheviks and the Communists have unrealistic views of human nature, and would impose changes upon the people based upon those unrealistic views. Unfortunately, the Busheviks, unlike the Communists, are also masters of Orwellian Newspeak, managing through their propaganda network to completely re-define the meanings of common words such as "conservative" to mean what they want them to mean. Thus the vast majority of people truly do believe that the Busheviks are "conservatives", even though that is not the reality. The reality is that the Busheviks are radicals -- radicals who, like Communists, are intent upon imposing their ideology at gunpoint upon the people. And like all radicals, their efforts will, in the long term, fail. Unfortunately, as with the case of the Soviet Union, the results of their failure are likely to be a lot of dead people and the impoverishment of a once-great nation. They've already done it to Iraq, which they've turned into a paradisehell-hole of terrorist bombings, ethnic warfare, and people dying by the thousands. Next stop is America. And we're letting them do it. We're letting them do it. Because the naked ape that is the human being would rather follow its alpha male to Hell than think for itself. Alas.
-- Badtux the Non-chimpanzee Penguin
