Well, I do have an idea of what liberals and coservatives tend to do, but you had me thinking about how I would define either group and I was comming up empty. I am definately conservative (ie, I fall on the convervative side of those defining issues that you mentioned), but I do see problems with some of the conservative stances.

As we all should, I try to seek out truth and make descisions based on knowledge rather than just aligning my beliefs with one group or another. I tend to find that I agree conervatives again and again, and really don't understand liberal stances on many issues. So, I'm pretty conservative (though I don't consider "liberal" a bad word).

I once heard a liberal say that the basic difference between liberals and conservatives is whether they view man as inherintly good (liberals) or bad (conservatives). This was a persons attempting to get to the core of issues and I thought he might have a point. It seemed to me that liberal stances are trying to "fix" people and conservatives are trying to bring people to "justice". Because I am pretty uneducated in politics (computers and music are my forte) I was looking to see if this was a close definition. After your lengthy post, I think that probably these issues can not be boiled down to such a simple statement.

-Jeff