Liberal vs. Conservative

Is it easier to be a liberal or easier to be a Conservative? You’re likely to already know the answer to this question. Let’s take a look anyway.

This question has come about due to the National Review article where some 38 self proclaimed Conservatives have banded together for the purpose of getting Donald Trump out as the leader of the Republican race for the Presidency. One of those 38 has even said that if Donald Trump is the nominee for the Republicans, he would vote for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is a self proclaimed socialist!

Every Republican that has run for President since Ronald Reagan was president has claimed to be a conservative. George H. W. Bush claimed to be a conservative. He was elected to his first term as president because he’d been Ronald Reagans Vice President and claimed to be conservative. His presidency though was run as a moderate and his first term was his only term as he lost in 1992 to Bill Clinton.

In 1996, Bob Dole was the Republican nominee. He brought on Jack Kemp as his VP. Kemp was a conservative. Dole was not and lost to Clinton. In 2000 George W. Bush ran as a conservative. An argument could be made that he was held back by his father being a moderate and it could fall to the son, but the alternatives were fairly limited and Bush had the money. He barely beat Al Gore and Bush turned out to be Conservative with very few variations.

In 2008, the Republicans ran John McCain. He too claimed to be a Conservative but even those unfamiliar with politics knew him to be at best a moderate Republican and an argument could be made that he was a liberal Republican. Just two years earlier he’d been considering changing parties. Obama won, even after Joe the plumber pointed out to Obama on the campaign trail on television that his ideas sounded more like Socialism.

In 2012 Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee. He was the father of government health care having instituted it in Massachusetts while governor. He too claimed to be Conservative but was more moderate. He lost to Obama.

Conservatives win. Moderates do not win. Why elect a moderate Republican when you can get the same thing (or worse) in a Democrat? Do you remember who the last Republican President was that was moderate? Richard Nixon in 1968, father of the EPA. We all remember what happened with him.

Being a liberal is easy. You only need promise to give people everything and call everything a Right. Right to health care. Want to keep your doctor, you can. We couldn’t. Costs will drop an average of $2,500, they went up, and this year a 46% increase not to mention the increased taxes and penalties.

Listen to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. They both talk about punishing Wall Street where all of the money is. Taxing the rich. Give to the poor. Sounds like Robin Hood. Bernie Sanders wants everyone to have an equal amount and he’s willing to take away from you if he thinks you have more than the next guy. Hillary Clinton says that College should be free and she’ll see to it. She also vilifies the rich. But despite her claims that she was broke when her husband and she left the White House, she is a millionaire.

Even with planned parenthood. Their reason for continuing to fund planned parenthood according to them is because they help women with health care needs. Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to solve that? Planned parenthood receives millions of dollars from the government each year. Then they donate millions to only Democrats. This is the same as the federal government funding the Democrat party.

Sanders and Clinton may make you feel good by saying they will tax the rich and corporations and big oil so that you can participate fairly, but those corporations don’t pay taxes. They write the checks for the taxes and they take the deductions on their taxes, but they don’t pay them. We do. When we buy their goods. If they get taxed more, they just raise their prices so that we pay more to fund those taxes. So when Sanders and Clinton talk about taxing the corporations or the rich, they are really taxing the rest of us.

It’s easy to take other people’s money and give it to someone else. But they don’t take their own money and do that. The government doesn’t earn money, they confiscate money. From you and from me.

Conservatives know that if you want to get people to do better, you provide them the opportunity. Not by punishing others for their hard work, but instead by not hindering everyone’s ability to work and earn more. We all aspire to do better. We want to be comfortable in our retirements when we can’t work any longer. We want our families to do better and be able to earn as much as possible so they can provide for their families. We don’t want big government telling us that we should care about this disease instead of that disease.

When the government takes more of our money we don’t direct our money to the causes that are near and dear to our hearts. Government directs the money for us and as with planned parenthood, to places that benefit Democrats and not the people.  Charitable giving goes down when taxes go up and it goes up when taxes come down.

The Republicans took the House back a few years ago promising to repeal Obamacare and to rein in spending. But one House of congress cannot do it alone. So the people voted the Republicans into the Senate. They still have not curbed spending. Instead they fully funded Obamacare, planned parenthood and increased spending to the tune of $1.3 trillion recently. This is not conservative. Boehner is gone because the people lost faith in him. When you say one thing and do another, you lose. Eric Cantor is a very good example of this when he was voted out during a primary in 2014. Cantor is a conservative but he got caught up in power and didn’t do as he said he would do. He didn’t live up to the standards that the voters expected out of a conservative.

It’s difficult being a conservative even when you are a conservative. Now we have a group of writers for the National Review stating that Donald Trump is not a conservative because he’s not like them. He’s made statements in the past supporting Obama’s stimulus deal, saying he’s pro-choice, and believes taxes should be raised.

I’m sure that all of them are true. But are they true today? If you’ve said something in the past that conservatives don’t believe today, is there no redemption from your past? If that’s the case how did we get Ronald Reagan? Reagan was not only a Democrat, but he was a liberal Democrat! He ran the Screen Actors Guild as it’s president. That is the actors union. A liberal organization. Can only Reagan change but not Donald Trump?

Donald Trump may not be a conservative. He may be a liberal. Or he may not care about anything other than what makes him look good and popular. However, he did serve a purpose.

Trump is the one that brought illegal aliens to the forefront when he said he’d send them back and build a wall. His statement about aliens coming across our southern border being rapists and murderers was true. It was all over the news in the summer of 2014. If he’s not conservative, he at least had the presence of mind to bring up an important conservative cause. The real national security issue, as we’re now seeing even moreso now that we’re being attacked on our own soil by radical Islamic fanatics.

Trump also has made political correctness the butt of jokes. It always has been but now it’s okay not being politically correct.

What may give fuel to the anti Trump fire is his latest stunt of pulling out of the debate on Thursday because Megyn Kelly is not being removed from the moderator panel. Does that remove Trumps “conservative credentials”? We’ll probably see If Trump is the reason for the ratings of the Republican debates being so high or if it’s because people really want a change from the Obama years.

Trump may or may not be conservative. He may be just a showman that’s getting all of the attention. To recognize a conservative, you have to not only listen to what they say but see what they do. They are not going to be perfect.

It’s amazing to me that when the Republican politicians and pundits were worried about Trump running as an independent if he didn’t win the Republican nomination, they hounded him until he agreed to pledge he would support the eventual nominee.. Now that he’s polling well enough to win the nomination, they don’t want to pledge to support the Republican nominee if it’s him. That’s two faced and not the type of thing that a conservative does. So maybe we ought to question the conservative credentials of those writing in the National Review.

It’s easy to be a liberal, but it’s difficult being a conservative. You have to live up to standards as a conservative. The National Review has failed to live up to those standards.

You’re welcome to comment.

Brett