Liberal vs. Conservative

I happened to find this link today in linkages to me: Unpartisan.

It's a blog news aggregator service that boasts "no human editor". My half hour or so on the site, I liked it (well, considering we're mid-way through a holiday weekend when the media is trying hard not to cover anything substantive).

I did note with some chagrin that a few of my postings were the only "liberal" (not a badge I wear comfortably or uniformly) posts against news stories also covered by the likes of nutso conservo-idealogues Michelle Malkin and Frank Gaffney where I could not be considered the flip-side of people so war hungry, so desperate to make a fortune off the misery of others.

The only thing I'm uncomfortable with in any large part - and this is hardly the sole blame of this site - is that the world in general nor the world of bloggers specifically cannot solely be assigned just one of these two labels: conservatives and liberals. It's a trap the far right uses, in fact, and the rest of the media has picked up (because no one defines everyone like the right!): meet our test or you're branded a liberal. In that regard, anyone to the right of Ronald Reagan now would be branded a liberal. I've heard McCain, for example, called a lefty liberal in the last few days.

I would not brand myself strictly a liberal blogger nor do I identify myself as liberal. I'm progressive on most points, conservative on a few, centrist on many others.

But it goes way beyond me: most people in America, for example, don't brand themselves as liberal or conservative. They're tired of the "two sizes fit all" landscape. In fact, in demographics, there's a saying that many people are conservative in thought but more progressive in daily life.