Labels

A couple of funny things happened today. We got news from some folks (friends) in Santa Fe that we were running a right wing radio show that was way too conservative for any so-called moderate to tolerate. Then later in the morning I got personally chastised for supposedly uttering far left progressive comments on the show yesterday when asked to comment on the gay marriage law in New York.

A pattern is emerging. Last week the exact same thing happened. A couple of self-identified conservatives took me to the woodshed over my repeated calls for getting ALL American ground troops out of the Middle East in favor of maintaining intelligence activity on the ground and quick strike forces at from nearby naval units. And so-called progressives were incensed that we would dare to bring an expert on the show from academia and the Cato Institute that had the gall to question faith-based global warming and what we regard as dubious climate change theories.

The good news is our critics are still listening. The bad news is they were employing the use of a political label filters (liberal or conservative) instead of relying on their own ability to recognize that we always try to think on an issue-by-issue basis without concern for which “box” our conclusions land us in. Long ago I came to realize that labels are terribly dangerous. They cause partisan politicians in both parties to keep both hawk and dove hats available for issues regarding the military and the federal budget. Labels also cause political observers to treat commentary like a crossword puzzle where the object seems to be to search for the correct viewpoint "label" instead of evaluating for the best practice. We hate the restrictive nature of being in some sort of philosophical label corral.