I’ve been asked by fellow despot admirer and law professor extraordinaire Tung Yin to explain my apparent lack of liberal bona fides. Well, aside from my penchant for writing unnecessarily long-windedly elitist-sounding blog entry sentences I offer up the following as examples of my ideological persuasion:

I support: a woman’s right to choose, separation of church and state (including legalized gay marriages), gun control (a certain level of anyways), automobile regulation (restricting size and weight for personal vehicles), affirmative action (to some extent, but not perpetual AA), decriminalization of personal drug use, progressive taxes (as most of the rest of life’s essential spending tends to be regressive), tougher environmental regulations (perhaps a Kyoto lite?).

I do not support: the death penalty, school vouchers (especially as a cover to give money to religious schools), faith based programs funded by public money, indefinite Guantanimo-ization of suspected terrorists.

I don’t see positions like, being against the war in Iraq, resistance to free trade, anti-globalization, not having a sense of humor, as being liberal positions. These are just positions held by people who are wrong ;) Ok so they’re predominately liberal, sue me.

It’s all relative, I think a reasonable person should be able to find people that are both on the right of them and on the left of them politically. So many people are entrenched in character assassination and/or just don’t look at the consequences of their position.

The reason I sound like a conservative sometimes is because there are liberal nutcases nyuck nyuck woo- woo iadj-iadj-iadj out there that I think are complete blowhards and hypocrites. Michael Moore is bitching in his movie 911 about how the war in Iraq would take away from the hunt for OBL. But does anyone believe that he would be a big supporter of hunting OBL if we HADN’T gone to war? Would he be urging more troops to Afghanistan, or for an alliance with Pakistan to help the search?

The war in Iraq is at LEAST partways a humanitarian effort, and no one less than Bill Clinton thought that they had WMDs (or he at least said so.) If Gore had been elected in 2000 I’m not sure that we wouldn’t be there anyways.