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TOO MUCH/ TOO LITTLE GOVERNMENT

I have been watching the news recently, and I have to tell you that the more I read; the more confused I become. Over the last year or so we have seen conservatives bemoan the fact that the Obama administration has made efforts to ensure that health insurance coverage is available to all Americans. Those efforts resulted in the health care bill which created a mandate. Conservatives complained that government was getting too big, getting itself involved into areas that it shouldn't and that we were now becoming a Socialist state by forcing everyone to buy health care coverage. Given the emphasis on the "freedom from" aspect of liberty, I thought that on any given issue, conservatives would be embracing that analysis on a myriad of political issues of the day.

But was I wrong. In a surprising turnaround, the Governor of Arizona signed into law a new bill that would require everyone to "carry papers". At any given point, law enforcement could stop you, ask you for ID and if you don't have it you would be charged with a crime. I would think the same group of people who would oppose fines on people who chose not to buy health insurance would also oppose jail time for people who didn't carry I.D. But it seems the conservative movement has severe cognitive dissonance (should that be recognized in the DSM?). They loved and embraced this legislation. This embrace makes me wonder what happened to the comfort and rationality of intellectual consistency and integrity? Frankly, I am missing my conservative intellectuals of years gone past. Will Scalia be the last consistent conservative judge? Was Buchanan the last honest and consistent conservative? I don't know. I miss those folks, I at least knew what their positions were and they made logical sense (even if at times not attentive to the nuances of our complicated lived lives). There could be a discussion.

I am a bit freaked out. I thought that conservatives would be the ones to protect me from a tyrannical state. It was the legislators from Idaho who objected to the mandates of the REAL ID Act. I now see that times have changed and that conservatives now love the kind of tyrannical government that flourishes in developing countries. From the poor in developing countries who are brutalized by the police when they fail to show their papers, to Jews, Gypsies and Gays who had to wear markers of their identity on their collars for the easy of ghettoization by pre-World War II Germany, to the stamps Pol Pot placed on his political opponents before terminating their lives; Conservatives have spoken and they want the U.S. to have the wonderful police brutality charm of developing nations and that's freaking me out. Truly freaking me out.

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