Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Conservatives Are Losing Virginia

I love my state.  I love the forests, the beaches, the rivers, and various cities.  Roanoke is a gem in what is otherwise a bleak area during the winter.  Blacksburg is an awesome college town and the surrounding area has some great camping sites.  Virginia Beach is a great place to vacation during the summer and it is a place I would like to possibly move to eventually.  The Northern Neck is a nice private getaway  location, if you can find a friend willing to lodge you.  Northern Virginia is very historic but also offers many places to work and live.  There are also two really nice theme parks.
But the people are getting crazier and crazier as the years go by.  Already the people of Virginia still have a positive attitude about Obama.  While this is probably true for the rest of America, Virginia used to be a conservative state.  I think that changed in the recent decade largely because of the expansion of government.  You cannot expect government workers to vote conservative because their jobs depend on big government.  In Northern Virginia this is especially true because a huge number of Federal government workers live here.
Northern Virginia was one of the fastest growing areas in the country.  The housing market skyrocketed at an alarming rate during the early Bush years with some double digit percentage increases in prices.  Everyone assumed that housing could not drop in price.  We all know that this is not the case.  I knew that as well and politely told everyone who urged me to buy a home or condo to stuff it.  I was not interested in buying a home until I could afford, the state of the economy be damned.  It looks like my patience will be rewarded once I do go about buying a home.
The influx of immigrants and the mass migration of government workers and people who are fleeing their supposed liberal utopias is probably the largest cause of conservatives losing one of the more traditionally conservative states.  Currently, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell is running as a moderate, or at least he started out as one.  That was a winning strategy for John McCain.  This is especially complicated when it comes to running against someone who is already pro-gun.  The only way for Bob McDonnell to win is to push for the elimination of the state income tax.
Of course, that only works if the people are conservative.  I do not blame the Republicans for losing conservatives in my state any more than I would blame George W. Bush for trusting George Tenet’s advice on the Iraqi Invasion.  The Republicans in this state, like so many other places, are very disorganized and are unable to properly display their conservative values.  I told my parents and brothers not to vote for Frank Wolf because he voted for the banking bailouts, but they all said that the Democrat opponent was more radical than Obama.  The lesser of two evils is still evil.  And death can come by one thousand cuts or just a simple stab to the heart.
The Republicans in my state really need to stand up for the principles of their party.  The Republican party platform is very conservative but the people who claim to be Republican are nothing more than liars.  I am tired of the moral busybodies of both sides telling me how I should live my life.  I just want someone, anyone, to stand up and say that you should live how you think you should, so long as it is honest and peaceful.  Instead we have people who are always tampering with the system in order to fix it.  Take it from a mid-level software developer: sometimes fixing it is much worse than leaving it be, especially when it is unnecessary.