...but it's not because I don't want to.  I frequently tell myself that I want to post this or that and I'll do it "tomorrow" or "this weekend," but inevitably something more important (read: tv, video games) comes up.

I have a pretty solid routine set and I can't seem to find much time to do the things I really like, much less post rambling nonsense on here.  But going back and reading stuff I wrote about years ago, it does upset me that I wasn't morre active in writing down my thoughts over the years.  It's  very interesting and self-reflective to go back and rethink things after a time.  We don't really notice how people, views or your own thought-process can change over time... it's such a gradual process that it's hard to really notice unless you have things like this to go back to and reflect over.

So with that in mind, I must go back to work.

I always get pissed when I have to listen to a right-winger go on and on about how Bush isn’t a REAL Republican; how he doesn’t embody the conservatism of Reagan.

Bullshit.  Bush is what Regan WISHES he could have been, had he not had to dealt with the USSR as a stop to the overarching “nation building” that G Dub seems to be loving, or a congress full of moderates instead of the right wing hacks that dominate the GOP nowadays.  The Right controlled everything in this country and shit has hit the fun because of it.

I was going to type up a rant about this, but read an article today that so completely covered what I was going to say that it now makes me feel like I’d just be inadvertly plagiarizing if I tried.  Quoted from an article by David Greenberg, “How Bush Stayed True to Conservatism” :

“A third strategy for the discontented is the one Hagel pursued Sunday: invoking beloved G.O.P. leaders of yesteryear—in his case, dating to Dwight Eisenhower. But Hagel’s history here is confused. As president, Eisenhower championed “modern Republicanism,” which made peace with the New Deal, modifying rather than rolling back the welfare state. It was this rapprochement with liberalism that angered an ideologically extreme band of activists, who turned first to Goldwater (unsuccessfully) and then to Reagan (successfully) to transform their movement into a winning electoral coalition.

“But even conservatives who stipulate Reagan, not Ike, as their beau ideal — which, as the last debate among G.O.P. White House aspirants suggests, includes almost all of them — are reading history selectively. Rhetorically, Reagan certainly hewed to the stance of small government, low taxes and an aggressive military that has inspired his followers since. But in practice he frequently deviated from his line when politics dictated — or when, inevitably, different conservative ideals clashed.

“The examples are many. Reagan’s skyrocketing budget deficits and multiple tax hikes violated the right’s notions of political economy as surely as any of Bush’s actions. His wars on drugs and pornography gave rise to intrusions on individual liberties similar to those that some libertarians now decry. Reagan’s foreign policy, notably in Central America, shared with Bush’s the assumption that America had to project more, not less, might around the globe. If Bush has abjured true conservative values, so did Reagan.

[…]

“Still, if any president has tried to implement conservative ideals, it’s Bush. Before Reagan, the so-called conservative movement had been an insurgent force within the Republican party. But starting in the 1980s, most of the liberals in the party left it, and for the last 10 or 20 years, the party and the movement have been more or less congruent. From 2002 to 2007, moreover, the G.O.P. controlled not just the White House but both houses of Congress, the federal judiciary and a majority of state governments, as well as more media outlets than ever before. They were thus able to impose a conservative agenda with little resistance.

“Indeed, so few were the obstacles that conservatism was able to run amok. The result — in the assessment of not just liberals but also other observers — has been disaster: a mess of a war, the failure to plan for Hurricane Katrina, the erosion of the church-state wall, widening inequality, the loss of civil liberties including habeas corpus, and scores of other ills that readers of this column can list as easily as I. This was the fruit of modern American conservatism.

“But now Republicans are deserting Bush. Businessmen and evangelicals, libertarians and social moderates are all astir. The reason isn’t that Bush failed to espouse their causes any more than Reagan did. From the Iraq War on down, after all, his policies have also been their policies — backed by their legislators, upheld by their judges, championed by their journalists.

WASHINGTON, DC—Flanked by key members of Congress and his administration, President Bush approved Monday a streamlined version of the Bill of Rights that pares its 10 original amendments down to a "tight, no-nonsense" six.

A Republican initiative that went unopposed by congressional Democrats, the revised Bill of Rights provides citizens with a "more manageable" set of privacy and due-process rights by eliminating four amendments and condensing and/or restructuring five others. The Second Amendment, which protects the right to keep and bear arms, was the only article left unchanged.

Calling the historic reduction "a victory for America," Bush promised that the new document would do away with "bureaucratic impediments to the flourishing of democracy at home and abroad."

[...]

"We're not taking away personal rights; we're increasing personal security," Ashcroft said. "By allowing for greater government control over the particulars of individual liberties, the Bill of Rights will now offer expanded personal freedoms whenever they are deemed appropriate and unobtrusive to the activities necessary to effective operation of the federal government."

Ashcroft added that, thanks to several key additions, the Bill of Rights now offers protections that were previously lacking, including the right to be protected by soldiers quartered in one's home (Amendment III), the guarantee that activities not specifically delegated to the states and people will be carried out by the federal government (Amendment VI), and freedom of Judeo-Christianity and non-combative speech (Amendment I).

According to U.S. Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), the original Bill of Rights, though well-intentioned, was "seriously outdated."

"The United States is a different place than it was back in 1791," Craig said. "As visionary as they were, the framers of the Constitution never could have foreseen, for example, that our government would one day need to jail someone indefinitely without judicial review. There was no such thing as suspicious Middle Eastern immigrants back then."

I think I'll have to start reading the Onion as my primary source of news.