I told some people I was going to write this, and now I am :-)

Around the 2000 election cycle, I became an official member of the Republican Party.  Since then, I’ve grown more and more disguisted with it.  Now, as our elections wind up today, six years later, I’m announcing that I’m no longer in the Republican Party.

From now on, I am simply a Conservative.

I find it funny reading liberals and Democrats who complain about how the “right wing” portion of the Republican Party has hijacked it.  Would if it were only true!  Instead, the Republicans treat conservatives much the same way that Democrats treat blacks: they toss us a few scraps and otherwise ignore us, because they assume we’ll vote for them anyway.  So we get tax cuts.  But then spending goes up more than when Democrats controlled the government.  Where’s the improvement?

So I didn’t take Rush Limbaugh’s advice today.  I did not vote.  Part of it was because I can’t vote right now since I didn’t register when I moved recently; but mostly it’s because I simply cannot, in good faith, perpetuate the myth that the Republican Party stands for my views.

Sure, they’re closer than the Democrat Party is.  But when your choices are being shot in the leg or being shot in the head, I’d rather choose neither.

Unfortunately, the third party options are rather bleak at the moment.  I have no delusions that I will not be forced to vote Republican in the next election.  But make no bones about it either: I’m going to be actively working as much as I can to spread the Conservative message.  There are enough of us out here that we can get a viable Party of our own.

So I’ll conclude by saying this: I hope the Republicans lose the house.  I hope we get two years of gridlock.  Because with the Republicrats out of control, the Conservative Party will no longer have to kowtow to them.  Instead, we Conservatives can separate and show the Republicrats where their true power came from anyway.  Hint: it’s not the faux-Moderates.

UPDATE: I just read this over at the Powerline blog: “Conservatives still have winning issues–racial equality, immigration enforcement, limited government–but the Republican Party has largely stopped running on them.”  Indeed, which goes to the heart of the above as to why I’m no longer a Republican.