"If Conservatism is the Ideology of Freedom, Then I'm the Queen of England"

I just ran into this must-read over at The Regressive Antidote. It's a fairly long piece by David Michael Green with the title that you see above, the headline to this blog post.

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always trying to take that freedom away from us, especially women and minorities? Why did they fight against the effort to end slavery, or to give women and minorities the vote, or to protect them from discrimination? Why are they still supporting efforts to disenfranchise minorities?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who bitterly opposed the New Deal at a time when Americans were ravaged by the Great Depression and the only freedom they were desperately seeking was from unemployment, starvation, humiliation and death? We should give thanks for their efforts ever since then, though, as they’ve been kind enough to keep trying to liberate seniors from the hell of receiving their Social Security benefits, bravely volunteering Wall Street to carry that burden instead.

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always propping up foreign dictators, like Saddam, Musharraf, Mubarak, Marcos, Pinochet, the Shah, Batista, the House of Saud and apartheid South Africa? Why did they, in some of these cases, secretly topple democratically elected governments to install repressive regimes, which they then assisted in the torturing of their own citizens? Exactly which definition of ‘freedom’ does that fall under?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always trying to control other people’s sexuality? Why are conservatives always telling us whom we can sleep with and what we can do in bed, even including whether we can use birth control?

And there's a lot more. Check it out and you will probably, like me, bookmark it in your favorites for further study. And now I can't wait to use it on some poor unsuspecting Rethug who starts harping on the "freedoms" that the CONservatives support. Then I can, as Green suggests, tell them, "Yeah, no kidding, freedom is a really good thing. You’d like it even better if you actually tried it out some time."