>> I'm a conservative and voting for Bush. Perhaps this
is not the right forum? <<

Well, Barry Goldwater would turn over in his grave. Why would a conservative
ever want to vote for Bush? What is conservative about him? To quote Doug
Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant
to President Reagan, "He is increasing the size and power of the U.S.
government both at home and abroad. He has expanded social engineering from
the American nation to the entire globe. He is lavish with dollars on both
domestic and foreign programs." That's a CONSERVATIVE?

Nels Stemm, in a widely quoted blog entry entitled "Is Bush a
Conservative?", wrote, "George W. Bush claims the mantle of conservative.
What is he conserving? Not my tax dollars. Not my liberty. Not the moral
standards of my society. The only thing he seems to be conserving - rapidly
expanding more like it - is the arbitrary power that the federal government
holds over our lives."

How about the words of Clyde Prestowitz, a former Goldwater supporter and
Reagan administration official: "Historically, conservatism in the United
States has meant support for small government, balanced budgets, fiscal
prudence and great skepticism about overseas adventures. What I see now is
an administration that's not for any of these things."

Travel back with me in time, to the halcyon days of Newt Gingrich and "the
Contract with America" that included "The Fiscal Responsibility Act: A
balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to
restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress."

Now come back to the present and ask yourself just how we "turned a
projected surplus of $5.6 trillion into a projected deficit of $4
trillion--in two years. As the London Financial Times observed after Bush's
second round of tax cuts was passed, this was not conservatism but madness.
'On the management of fiscal policy, the lunatics are now in charge of the
asylum,' the paper commented. 'Reason cuts no ice; economic theory is
dismissed; and contrary evidence is ignored. But watching the world's
economic superpower slowly destroy perhaps the world's most enviable fiscal
position is something to behold.' " (The Nation, May 13, 2004)

Or maybe this from Kevin Phillips: 'The Bush Administration is not against
big government. They're against the portion of it that regulates business
and requires tax increases, against a welfare system. When it's the latter,
they're against big government, but when it's big government that takes care
of the oil industry or bails out financial institutions or pumps money into
the Pentagon, then they tend to be in favor of that."

If you want to say you're a Republican and thus are voting for Bush, fine.
If you want to say you are invested in nation building, or will do anything
to preserve tax cuts for the wealthiest people in our society, or just like
the way W grins at a barbeque, fine too.

But don't say "I'm a conservative so I'm voting for Bush," because there is
nothing conservative about the government of George W. Bush.

Christie