[General Topics] TJBunch1228:
You are full of so much fail it boggles my mind. Did you get your High School diploma off the internet? Jesus.

Democrats have controlled the House and Senate since 2005, they have controlled the entire country since 2009. In fact, until the Fall of 2010, there was almost no voice of Conservatism even present in the Republican party. Bush was not a Conservative, he was a Moderate (read: Liberal) Republican. He spent us into debt unheard of until Obama took the reins. The few Conservatives in Congress fought every Bush spending policy tooth and nail.

Eliminating Saddam lessened the sum total of evil in this world. You're right, though. The Republican President along with the Democratic Congress elected to send our boys over there without enough of an exit strategy.

Conservativism is about limiting the scope and reach of Government. The Government should be there to enforce the laws set forth in the Constitution and to protect every American from any body who would seek to legislatively undermine those rights, or militarily remove those rights from us. Foreign, Domestic, it makes no difference.

Rest assured friend, when the **** hits the fan, it will be us who are on the front-line defending your ability to pop off with ignorant **** you saw on Rachel Maddow or on an episode of Law & Order. Conservatives don't take away freedoms or rights, we don't control the Dept. of Education, WE didn't bail out the Auto Companies or Wall-Street execs. If we had our way, a dying company would die. The Democrats are the "too big to fail" crowd, they are behind Cash for Clunkers, they run the DOE(ducation), FTC, FCC, DMV, DOT, IRS, USPS, DOE(nergy), EPA, FDA, FEMA, ACORN & HUD to name a few, all of which are more efficiently run by the Private sector in orders of magnitude.

Since you mention Dept. of Education specifically; which party is every teacher union's favorite party? Why do they vote Democrat? Because Democrats support tenure for teachers instead of being paid for performance. This breeds an environment of apathy, because honestly, why work hard when you can vote Democrat and they'll see to it that the Unions stay in power and get your paycheck to you regardless of how well you teach?

Government regulation and intervention does not breed innovation, it stifles it. When you need to go through Governmental red tape for years, and spend thousands out of your own pocket paying off beaurocracies in order to get your "next big thing" on the market, you end up giving up. It's too much work, and you cannot afford it.

The free market thrives on competition, not regulation. The person or group with the cheaper, better product will succeed, and the other guy will not. It is very simple.

Liberals have hijacked the word "progressive". They are not progressive, they are regressive. They would like to see European market ideas here in the States that are failing and have failed for 50 years across the pond. They have not offered anything new. It is just new to Americans who do not know any better because they are too lazy to learn history.

Edit: I didn't even touch the Welfare State, lest my rant transform into a full-blown thesis.