In Which I Abuse Italicized Foreign Phrases

I've been loathe to breathe even a single political word in this space, because, well, I'm an attention whore, and I'm afraid of alienating the few people who do come here and feed my need. Y'all seem to be such kinder, gentler souls than I, and I didn't want to out myself as an auslander.

But now that I've been voted a sensitive, albeit Rockin', girl, I think it's time I admitted it: I voted for George W. Bush.

I'll wait for the gasps to die down.

I only did it the first time, I promise. I won't defend the decision, because I'm sure most of you consider it indefensible. At least the second time I voted Libertarian.

I don't know what to think about politics anymore. When I was in high school, I was oblivious. When I was in college, I was indoctrinated into the affirmative action outrage, animal rights outrage, pro-choice outrage. I've kept most of that last one.

When I got out of college, I did a lot of independent reading, some of it about the Civil War, and began to think more about states' rights and large, centralized federal bureaucracies. It's not the lesson we're supposed to draw from the slavers/liberators morality play that the Civil War story has become, but I began to believe that the larger a bureaucracy became, the less effectively it was able to manage the problems for which it was created. A large bureaucracy with coercive power has a built-in motivation to grow ever-larger, and corruption and abuse are inescapable side effects.

So conservatism, here I come! And which of the two major political parties pretends to be the fiscally conservative defender of the Constitution? Well, they both do to a degree, but I bought into the Republican hype because the Democratic hype doesn't have that much "limited role of government" rhetoric to it. And then there was Bill Clinton. I spent the end of the nineties whining, with much exasperation, "He's the chief law enforcement officer in the nation, who committed perjury and asked others to commit perjury in order to avoid personal liability in a civil lawsuit brought by a private citizen! Of course he should be impeached!" And the answer was always, "It's just sex. Everybody does it!" And so I swore off the Democratic Party for all eternity, amen.

But a friend made it his personal mission to liberalize my conservatism. His particular bent is environmentalism, and there is some truth to the idea that there is no other entity in the world with the authority to protect our natural resources from selfish misuse better than a large, federal government. So there's that.

And then there's the fact that the Bush administration, those fiscally conservative defenders of the Constitution, have grown the federal bureaucracy and mutilated American civil liberties more than any other administration ever, Republican or Democrat. So there's that, too.

Oh my, I just received an office-wide email about building security. It has the subject line "Back Door Entry." Must. Resist. The urge. To reply. Must! Resist!

Sorry, I got distracted for a second there. Where was I? Oh yeah, what's a fiscally conservative, socially laissez-faire boy to do?

I was thinking about this guy, but he came across as a total goofball with virtually no political savoir faire when I saw him on The Colbert Report. Of course, how can anybody come across as anything but a goofball when they're on The Colbert Report? But then I also read that while he doesn't think the Federal government has the authority to regulate abortion and gay marriage (they are more appropriately left to the individual states to legislate), he is personally strongly opposed to them. So that takes him right off the table. I can't vote for a guy who, upon becoming President, might suddenly feel the call of his moral imperative.

What does that leave? Where does someone turn when he wants a small federal government that doesn't interfere in social issues like gay marriage? Libertarians, I guess. But that seems kind of like voting for your little brother's video phone footage for Best Picture Oscar: it could be a gas, and it might even be true, but I can tell you right now, he won't ever have to worry about writing that acceptance speech. Anybody got any better ideas?