Frustrations with Politics

I know that for the most part, our family blog is for, well...our family. Tom keeps everyone up-to-date with his political debates over on his blog. But I really feel the necessity of posting something on my own ideas and frustrations with the political world right now.

You might have guessed by reading Tom's blog that both he and I are supporting Mike Huckabee over John McCain. There are a lot of reasons for this. Watch this video on CNN (yes, Tom already posted it on his blog, but I like it) and you'll see that Huckabee touches on MAJOR issues for me as a conscientious Catholic voter.

As Catholics we are called to vote with an informed conscience. My informed conscience tells me that, according to Church teaching, certain issues take precedence over others. The so-called "life issues" that are important and non-negotiable for me as a Catholic are abortion, euthanasia, gay "marriage," fetal stem cell research (I fully support adult stem cell research, which has yielded hundreds of advances while fetal stem cell research has yielded NONE), and human cloning. Other issues, such as immigration, welfare reform, etc. are quality of life issues and to me, take a back seat when we cannot even guarantee the right to life of the most vulnerable in our society.

Ok, enough of that. It's only one of my frustrations. Here's another one. I tend to be both a social conservative (see above issues) as well as a fiscal conservative, and I favor less government intervention wherever possible. What I CANNOT understand is the sheer volume of conservative political pundits who cannot seem to get their hierarchy of values straight! Tom and I are both fans of talk radio, but frankly, I can't stand to listen to it around elections times simply because every one of them rants and raves about "real conservative" issues such as illegal immigration, welfare reform, the war in Iraq, government spending, etc. But do you think that they even mention the Life Issues? Nope. Almost silent on them. In fact, they all seem to be dead-set against the only truly pro-life, pro-family candidate out there: Mike Huckabee. At almost every opportunity, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Matt Drudge, John Carlson (local in Seattle), Kirby Wilbur (also local in Seattle), Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter take shots at Huckabee, calling him a variety of names from "religious bigot" all the way to "stupid and easily led."

Ah! I'm tired of it. Here's a great article on Catholic Online that expresses my frustrations beautifully.

Enough about politics. Clare is napping but will probably wake up in a few minutes, so I'm going to go try to get some laundry done while she's still down for the count.