Oh, yeah. There's no anger at all on the Left.

Check the conservative baggage claim area and you find such items as opposing big government, abortion, gun control, environmentalism, affirmative action (a form of civil rights) and homosexuality. It means supporting religion in politics, school prayer, creationism and the military (through spending, not serving).

Funny, when I point to the Green Party, A.N.S.W.E.R., and other large radical movements as the new heartbeat of the Left in this country, I get ripped about three new ones around here for oversimplification. Yet this guy gets away with defining conservatives with this steaming pile of stereotypes.

Oh, yeah, we all believe in creationism, and there are NO conservatives serving in the military. And the only reason we have a foreign policy at all is because of those damn sneaky Israelis.

And I suppose this guy's friends all think he's brilliant and insightful.

Let me try the leftist baggage area out for size:

"Supporting maximizing the size of government, abortion on demand for all ages and at all stages of pregnancy without parental notification for minors, making private gun ownership illegal, opposing human industrial activity anywhere in the environment, and quotas based solely on skin color. And stridently opposing Judeo-Christianity in any aspect of public life, not to mention culturally."

Is this any more accurate?

As for attitudes about gays, and conservative morality, how many of you actually read Brooks' article? I'm wondering if Goldsborough did. The primary value in Brooks' eyes is that of marriage, in the context of a moral commitment. Goldsborough sounds like he heard about the article from a friend.

* * *

Are the Republicans in trouble, philosophically? Sure. But then there are probably no more than two dozen politicians of both parties whose philosophy is any deeper that "how do we get and keep power?" And most of those are still Republicans.

I have said here before that the problem is inherent in a system of government that has devolved primarily into a massive and ungovernable engine for redistributing wealth.

When the government has the power to hand out money on any pretense, for no value returned; and the method of gaining power in such a government is the democratic vote given to all citizens without limit, it doesn't take a genius to see the only direction a positive feedback system like this could go.

Whose vote counts more? The millionaire getting his wealth sucked away, or the hundred people gleefully grabbing it at the other end?

Democrats ride the wave enthusiastically. Their end goal is an infinite and benevolent State, on which all citizens rely for every need. The origins of this philosophy are violently suppressed, even. The Republicans who think like libertarians are selected out by the election process. Those who think more like Democrats are kept. This is not a new problem.

Democrats are creating the myth that Bush is suddenly the "spending" Republican, while Democrats, as this article say, are suddenly fiscally responsible. Only an idiot would believe the latter, but the former is not true either. Many of our most onerous regulatory agencies came into being under Republican administrations, back to Nixon. And spending? Eight years of Reagan decreased the size of our government not one bit, and it wasn't all the Democratic Congress either.

I'm not happy about it. But unless something very basic is done with the way our government is run, I see our nation ending up decades from now as yet another poverty-stricken welfare state, before the inevitable decay of such systems into a tyranny.

What to do about it? I have no good answers that do not tread on sacred toes like universal suffrage, or the "Living Constitution."