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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (184826)	3/15/2004 9:38:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572776

"Tax cuts" are not traditionally conservative, small government is conservative. A low tax rate is traditionally conservative. Fiscal discipline is another traditionally conservative stance one that Bush doesn't seem to care a lot about. Supporting a strong national defense is conservative, nation building is the opposite of conservative. Supporting a strong military is something Bush has done even before Iraq or Afghanistan. Conservatives are by nature a little isolationist. There is an isolationist wing of conservatism but not all of conservatism or conservatives are isolationist. re: The steel tariffs where really neither conservative or liberal. You don't know conservative, do you? At a number of times conservatives where one of the main forces behind tariffs. Modern conservatives have tended to be more likely to be against them then liberals but the tendency is not strong enough to identify either group by their stance on tariffs. re: The overall increase in spending, esp. in domestic spending is rather liberal as is the new drug entitlement, but I still thing GW Bush is more conservative then say his father was. Wrong again. Even Clinton was more conservative than Bush, by a mile. Bush is the most liberal Pres of my lifetime. I disagree with that idea. But I can understand why you think that way. "Conservative" is a complex term with a number of meanings including some meanings that are contradictory. "Liberal" probably covers even more territory then "conservative". In modern American politics "conservative" is most strongly associated with support for a powerful military and with support for low taxes. The next strongest association is probably the "cultural/religious" conservative association. Liberal is most associated with welfare and entitlement programs and with government spending and regulation and high or increasing taxes under a "progressive" tax structure. It is also associated with strong opposition to the "cultural/religious right", and with support for "multiculturalism", "alternative life styles" and having American foreign policy be highly respectful of, or even determined by the opinions of other countries and the UN. Some aspects of "liberalism" certainly would apply to Bush. Spending in particular, and also the fact that he supported a new drug entitlement program. The conservative side of Bush would be his support for lower taxes, a strong military, and not having American foreign policy be determined by the UN. It could be argued that his record on regulation is conservative because he did scale back one or two or Clinton's last minute regulations and he isn't adding new regulations as fast as Clinton was at the end of his term but I think this is only enough for him to be called a moderate in this area, not a strong conservative. BTW - Do you consider Reagan a conservative? What other presidents in modern times would you call conservative? Tim