Tom Delay once said, “I’m proud to be an ideologue.” The problem with such a stand is that ideologues are loyal to an ideology, rather than the people they were elected to represent. We see the effect with the gridlock in Washington and conservatives complete antipathy toward taxes of any kind.

If you’re familiar with American history, you’re aware of the stock market crash of 1929. Investors bought stocks on margin. When their loans were called, Wall Street imploded. Banks went down like dominoes, and American citizens lost their savings. Bank deposits were not guaranteed at the time, and people were up crap creek without a paddle. Matters got worse when the Dust Bowl descended upon America.

Democrats, under FDR, set about putting things back together, passing legislation to insure bank deposits, provide unemployment insurance and social security for senior citizens. The demolition squad (Republicans) called the rebuilding project socialism. Sound familiar?

Thanks to the ideologues and their deregulation mania, it all happened again in 2008, and the ideologues are once again calling the rebuilding legislation socialism.

Let’s take a look at the conservative philosophy DeLay was so proud of:

1. Cut taxes (primarily for the rich). What this is supposed to do is encourage capitalists to invest in new business, creating more jobs. Trickle down, in other words. In practice, trickle down works for a while until the next bubble comes along. Meanwhile, schools, roads, the environment and the poor suffer. Anyone who thinks cutting taxes for the rich is going to help the economy, should read Thorstein Veblen's THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS. He had these people pegged over a hundred years ago.

2. A strict interpretation of the Constitution. America was a completely different place in 1787. Most people were farmers. Strict interpretation equals Herbert Hoover, too slow to make changes when needed. Besides, The Constitution never was religiously adhered to. The Bill of Rights and the other Amendments to the Constitution would not exist if the Founders had not embraced change. Is it constitutional to use the National Guard to fight a foreign war?

3. Balance the budget. But when Ideologues had the chance they haven’t done it. Who was the last Republican to balance the budget? When you start a war in Iraq while simultaneously cutting taxes, you need to put it on your Chinese credit card. Somebody explain to me why borrowing money from a communist country is okay when these same politicians claim communism and socialism will lead to the end of the world.

4. Defense, defense. According to NEWSWEEK the U.S. spends $696,268,000,000 a year on defensive spending. Russia spends $40,484,000,000. China spends $60,187,000,000 and they have over two trillion in reserves. But they don’t fight any unnecessary wars.

5. Values. Mostly fundamentalist Christian values. As many as 30% of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, including George Washington, belonged to the Freemasons. One of their principal tenets as Freemasons was separation of church and state.

6. States Rights. Except when the Florida Supreme Court rules that Al Gore deserves a recount. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, recently threatened to secede from the union if Obama Health Care legislation was passed. Other ideologues have evoked nullification. Didn’t we fight this war a hundred and fifty years ago?

7. Freedom. No, tea baggers, you can’t fly your plane into the IRS building. This is the way freedom works: You are free to do what you please in America, providing you don’t hurt anyone else. In other words, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater.” Bringing your gun into a restaurant is intruding on the rights of everyone else present.

In every day life we teach our kids to be reasonable, to compromise whenever possible. Do Republicans teach their kids to take their ball and go home if they don’t get their way? Teddy Kennedy, often called the biggest liberal in the Senate, reached across the aisle to support No Child Left Behind. Senator Hatch, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, cried when Teddy died. Most Americans are moderates, some to the right of center, some to the left. Our president, Barack Obama, is a left of center pragmatist. If he were the flaming liberal, conservatives would have you believe, he would have pulled the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as he took office. One of the reasons his poll numbers are down is because he didn’t go far enough in respect to health care and he didn’t go far enough with financial regulation. People, the votes weren’t there. There are these moderate democrats called Blue Dogs who act like Republicans most of the time. Where are the Blue Dogs in the Republican party?