Liberal, Conservative, What's In A Label

I invited a friend to visit my weblog the other day. I related that my father thought I was a liberal, my brother thought that I was a conservative, and that I thought of myself as an enlightened moderate. I suppose that this was by way of warning her about the content that she might find on my weblog. Sort of a TV style rating for Blogs; warning the following content may be philosophically contrary to your views.

But then I got to thinking how can I be liberal, conservative, or moderate to different people. I know who I am at my core and what my beliefs are, and I am pretty much in agreement with myself most of the time. Is it their problem? Or is it mine?

But why have these labels “liberal”, “conservative” become such red flags? It’s as if the nation as a whole is keeping score deciding who is red or blue, who is righteous and who is wrong. It only seems to be more prevalent today because of the media blasting at us 25-7. Our founding fathers, as I have been reading in a recent book “Founding Brothers” were as irascible, cantankerous, and vitriolic, as any of today’s crop of knuckleheads and lunkheads (and they did it without the help of CNN or Fox). I say deity bless them (red herring humor for those of you weighing me on the left-right scale). But as for me I wont be subscribing to any one point of view. I will be pretty much sticking to my “core values and beliefs”:

• Abortion should be a woman’s right between her and her god not a politicians.
• Abortion should not be used as birth control.
• I believe in personal responsibility especially for elected officials and televangelists.
• No civilian needs a semiautomatic assault weapon.
• At the heart of every tax crusader is a tax cheat.
• Rap Music is vile soul destroying music and just not as good as anything else including country music and polka.
• Liberal do-gooders should get a full time job at a soup kitchen.
• Conservative televangelist should get a full time job at a soup kitchen
• I support our troops not the war.
• Vladimir Putin has no soul and single handedly bombed Chechnya to the ground while we whistled WMD.
• There are almost two billion people in China and India how many jobs do you think we can outsource before we become a third world nation?
• The three branches of government are pretty inefficient and often times get in the way of getting real work done but until politicians stop thinking that theirs is the only right way I say what’s a little delay in our march to forcing you to do it my way.