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The principles that rule this blog

Principles that will govern my thoughts as I express them here (from my opening statement):


  • Freedom of the individual should be as total as possible, limited only by the fact that nobody should be free to cause physical injury to another, or to deprive another person of his freedoms.
  • Government is necessary primarily to provide those services that private enterprise won't, or won't at a price that people can afford.
  • No person has a right to have his own beliefs on religious, moral, political, or other controversial issues imposed on others who do not share those beliefs.

I believe that Abraham Lincoln expressed it very well:

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot
so well do, for themselves — in their separate, individual capacities.”


Comments will be invited, and I will attempt to reply to any comments that are offered in a serious and non-abusive manner. However, I will not tolerate abusive or profane language (my reasoning is that this is my blog, and so I can control it; I wouldn't interfere with your using such language on your own!)

If anyone finds an opinion that I express to be contrary to my principles, they are welcome to point this out. I hope that I can make a rational case for my comments. Because, in fact, one label I'll happily accept is rationalist.

Thursday, June 09, 2011

Not conservative enough? Rick Santorum? Weird...

As I said yesterday, Rick Santorum is probably the candidate I like least, now that Mike Huckabee has taken himself out of contention. But this is because I think he is too far to the right, particularly on social issues. So I was ill prepared to see a column in today's Washington Examiner chastising Santorum for not being conservative enough!

It seems that what Examiner columnist Timothy Carney finds objectionable is that, back in 2004, Santorum and Pres. George W. Bush backed the re-election campaign of Arlen Specter.

In that year, Specter represented the GOP's best hope to retain that seat in Pennsylvania. Any good Republican should have backed Specter, given that nominating a more conservative candidate risked giving that seat to the Democrats. (Sure, six years later, Specter, tiring of fighting arch-conservatives in Republican primaries, switched to the Democrats. And Pat Toomey, the same man who had challenged Specter in the GOP primary six years earlier, actually won the Senate seat! But 2010 was a different thing from 2004. And it is very unlikely that Toomey would have won in 2004.)

But Carney is so enamored of ideological purity that he considers Rick Santorum insufficiently conservative. This sort of weirdness amazes me. And it's the kind of thing that makes it hard for me to stay a Republican — but, of course, it's the extremism of the Democrats in the opposite direction that keeps me in the GOP.

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