Nice view. I like it too.

Then, of course, there's Phil Och's "Love Me, I'm A Liberal" to keep us honest.

Maybe a slightly cynical view is that a Republican politician would sell you their mother and admit it proudly.

A Democrat would sell her, as well, but when mothers start getting scarce, they would at least sense their endangerment and set up organizations try to raise money preserve what's left, hopefully before it's too late. If the mother mother population bounces back, they'll start selling them again and go find something else they've helped deplete in their time that's endangered to hold rallys to save. Thus Democrats at least like to preserve traditions and the more liberal they are, the more they like to do so.

Republicans, for the most part, ignore tradition and will unwittingly preserve it by doing such unless they find a way to pave over it and make a profit. You might get them to pitch in to save an endangered Battlefield, if you're lucky. Or anything threatening their OWN neighborhood. But if they can eradicate something, they usually will.

When a conservative holds a yard sale and get rid of, say, their old LPs, you won't find much traditional or folk recordings beyond hymns (and homemade records of Gospel groups might be a dime for two dozen.) or the odd Honky Tonk or Bluegrass that some might hold onto to the end if you're lucky, even though a very great number of the "Folk" themselves vote Republican. And even if they themselves are Conservatives, their own homemade music and crafts will find more buyers among the Liberals.

That stirs up another dreaded "What is Folk?" question. If it is what they were raised on and maybe what they still treasure in CD form, are Ray Conniff and Percy Faith, functioning as folk music to them? Is John Phillip Sousa their Woody Guthrie?

And if Liberals are more likely to save traditions or environment and the like than those on but not nescessarily in the Right, then just what is it that a Conservative actually conserves?

So therefore, I tend to vote mostly Democratic (though Maryland HAS been blessed in the past with some fine Republicans the calibre of Mac Mathias and Connie Morella), as they are more likely to help preserve old ways that I feel very Conservative to still believe in.

"Splain it to me, Kingfish......."