Quote:With pleasure:

 

1. The Patriot Act, and everything it's led into. This should come as no surprise to anyone here, but the Republican Party laid the framework to systematically strip Americans of our rights when they passed the Patriot Act. It was the beginning of the modern push for stupidity over liberty, and will almost certainly haunt us into the next administration.

 

2. Extreme military spending. We're going to spend $400 billion (or, likely, more) on a jet platform that is inadequate for all three of its primary users and gets its butt kicked by a 40-year-old F-16 in mock dogfights. As it stands, our Air Force can kick the crap out of the rest of the world. Why do we need to increase military spending? Why not just, I don't know, stop wasting resources trying to topple regimes in the Middle East and bring equipment home rather than continuing to sink money into a military industrial complex that gives us virtually zero return on investment?

 

3. Imperialism in the Middle East. JJ can tell you all about my thoughts in this area, so I won't waste much breath beyond saying that America has been screwing around in the Middle East since the 1940's, and it's worked out for us exactly zero times.

 

4. Continuing to focus on stupid crap like same-sex marriage and abortion as the economy and job market tank, i.e., legislating morality. Maybe, just maybe, if more conservatives would approach the issue like John Kasich and come out against both issues while recognizing that we have a million more pressing agenda items than who someone else chooses to sleep with or what a woman does with her body before we double back to those, the GOP wouldn't be facing the lack of millennial support and, ultimately, bleak future that it does.

 

5. Illegal immigration. "Build the wall and deport them all" is stupid, expensive and unmanageable. The border fence cannot be completed. It's not just budgetary; it's about terrain. Beyond that, the border fence is comically easy to defeat, even in the highest-security areas like right along the border in southwestern San Diego, where you have the fence, 100 yards of well-lit cement ditch then a second, stronger fence. If you go out to the shoreline, it's even easier: swim out 100 yards, cross the border, swim back in and vanish into a crowd. Any policy focused on spending even more money on a system doomed to fail is asinine.

 

And, for bonus points, here are a bunch of liberal policies that I absolutely can't stand:

 

1. The expansion of spying on Americans. Bush laid the foundation, but Obama gave us militarized police, naked body scanners in airports, TSA checkpoints on highways, vast expansion of the NSA's data collection, and he "encouraged" Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. to provide data to the DOJ without a warrant. He's as much an enemy of the American people as Cheney was in that regard.

 

2. The refusal to say no to a minority group. The Missouri students' protest was created on a solid foundation, and they made some great points, but they chose to go over the top in their demands, and no one in a position of authority called them on demanding the university president to provide a lengthy, written and verbal apology at the same time that he resigned. No one called them on wanting a say in the new president's hiring. Black lives matter is another great one: it started with the best of intentions, but it's lately been more of an excuse to riot than anything else. Liberal politicians continue to cozy up to them, though, because they're afraid to say no to their voters. There are still a healthy number of people in and around Dallas supportive of the clock kid, even after his parents made it very clear that the whole thing was little more than a shakedown. There's a difference between reaching an understanding and giving the thief all your money because you're afraid his family won't like you if you shoot him.

 

3. The "political correctness" movement. When a girl with male genitalia wants to use a locker room designed for girls with female genitalia and people actually defend her wanting to do so, we have problems. When schools are sending kids home for having Star Wars blasters on their shirts, we have a problem. When a black student at a prestigious university says that she feels oppressed because she has to learn from white professors and read books written by white people and the school's response is to lend credibility to her claims, we have a problem. The next generation of Americans will be softer than warm butter if the milennials (and earlier) don't start saying "no" to them, even if it means that a few feelings get hurt or a few white professors end up before academic review boards because they're, um, white.

 

4. Opening the gates to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, if not more, despite the fact that the FBI has said that they can't even adequately vet the ones coming over now. You can provide charity and compassion to people coming from a war-torn country without letting them off the boat, handing them a visa and asking politely that they not radicalize any American citizens or blow up a bus or anything. Ultimately, we should be focused on getting them into the UN refugee camps abroad that were kinda, sorta designed for that sort of thing.

 

5. Thought policing. This kind of ties into 2 and 3, but it's more related to the handling of high-profile opponents of same-sex marriage and that stupid bakery example that won't die. Apparently, one can't hold to their beliefs in this country without being a bigot. If you're a county clerk and your job is to uphold the law of the land, you have no choice but to do so or resign. That Kentucky twit's sin wasn't thinking differently from the mainstream; it was that she actively broke the law by enforcing those beliefs. You wouldn't know that from reading Huffington Post or watching MSNBC, where she was derided daily as some sort of backwards-thinking neanderthal. That bakery that won't die? They could very easily have avoided the whole mess by putting up a sign saying that they'd gladly bake a cake for anyone, but they reserved the right to not design cakes in a manner against their beliefs. Instead, again, made monsters by the left. That's become the far left's MO--either you're with us, or you're demonized. It's every bit as insidious a method of control as the NSA is, only this time peer pressure is being used instead of government oversight to force compliance.

 

6. The refusal to call radical Islamic terrorism for what it is: plain and simple. If eight Muslims take a tour of Paris, killing anyone they see during that tour, and they do so on the grounds of their beliefs, it's radical Islamic terrorism. One can acknowledge that it's radical Islamic terror without demeaning 1.6 billion people, but the left doesn't seem to get that. It doesn't fit in with the narrative of, "No, seriously guys, we're all friends here, really." We're not. There are a small number of radical Muslims who want us dead. The left is afraid that acknowledging that Islam is a motivation for terrorism would play into the right's hands, so they don't do it. Political expediency.

 

7. The war on guns. Gun restrictions need to happen. Gun registries need to happen. Trying to take away all guns is stupid, it's unconstitutional, it's unfair and it's bound to lead to dozens of shootouts, if not more, when the cops show up to take guns away from people's homes. The "all-or-nothing" mentality of gun control espoused by so many on the left is disingenuous and does nothing to help solve the growing problem of gun violence.

 

8. Fixing the economy. We can only throw borrowed money at our debt for so long before the house of cards collapses. It's time to put a plan into place that scales back that borrowing and tapers it down to zero over the course of a couple years, and makes drastic cutbacks to government policies and programs (including, especially including, the military industrial complex) so that we can balance the budget and be stable as a nation again. If China were to come calling one day and say that they weren't going to lend us any more money until we paid them in full, we'd be boned.

 

9. Education. Common Core is a joke. Education in America is a regionalized thing, and trying to govern it from the federal level is a disaster in waiting. The notion that college should become the equivalent of a high school diploma is unrealistic given the state of our economy--and the number of college grads that make a living collecting unemployment. Instead, funnel kids out of high school into trade schools, with college being an option for those who want to pursue it. Liberals are using schools to indoctrinate kids into many of their policies above, and that's wrong. It needs to stop happening.

 

10. Illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants should not receive welfare, access to free healthcare, education (especially in-state tuition), any of that. Just like I said above that "build the wall and deport them all" is idiotic, so is the far left's plan for solving the problem by opening the doors to any and all who want to walk through them, regardless of whether they go through the right way or not.

 

TL;DR- everyone with a D or an R on their voter card is a blind fool

 

TJ, you need a vacation or something.

 

I assumed that your question was about policy that has been passed and is currently in place.

 

Regarding conservative ideals and policy, my answer would be different.  Most of it focuses on social issues which I think are at the bottom when it comes to priority.

 

1.  End the gay marriage debate.  We are living in different times, and we are not a country with "religious and/or moral police".  The gay lifestyle is a fact of life now and we should afford them the same legal rights when it comes to insurance, taxes, etc.  I'm still all for calling it a "civil union" legally, but that's a whole other debate and not really worth putting much effort into.

 

2.  End the abortion fight.  While I personally am against abortion, I don't think that there should be restrictive laws against it.  However, I am all for de-funding any group that provides it (Planned Parenthood).  In other words, abortion should not be illegal, but at the same time it should not be funded in any way on the taxpayer dime.

 

3.  More importantly, end the above policies that I mentioned in my first post.  Shrink/streamline the size and bureaucracy of the federal government, and restore real protection of the American people.  As an example, could Border Patrol and Customs be combined and consolidated into one agency?  Certainly.  What about NSA and the CIA?

 

AS a bonus, what also needs to happen is to get rid of unnecessary government agencies such as the Department of Education, Bureau of Land Management, etc.  These government agencies serve no real useful purpose, yet consume tax payer dollars.

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