Hard Times in the Land of Plenty... of candidates, that is.

I feels hard to be a conservative these days.

It shouldn't be - goals of encouraging more people working and fewer ending up on welfare; having a smaller, less intrusive government; religious freedom; the right for law-abiding citizens to own a gun for hunting and to protect themselves... these are all principles that make sense to me.

Examples of why these principles work can be found everywhere you look. Take this past Labor Day Weekend in Chicago, IL: where the right to legally bear arms has been stripped away, 8 were killed and 46 were wounded in gun violence. In a city so culturally rich and with so much history in shaping America as we know it, this statistic is disheartening.

Then there's the video that went viral recently of a 30-year-old woman who has found every loophole she can in our welfare system and has been receiving government money for 12 years, and who doesn't believe she should ever get a job because she gets a check regularly funded by us. Government assistance was designed to help get people back on their feet during difficult times - job loss, health & medical issues, natural disasters, etc. - and that's a good thing because we should do what we can to help others. But it was designed to be temporary, not as a way of life for the lazy and the sluggish.

And then we come to religious freedom, brought to the forefront of the 2016 Presidential election thanks to the refusal to issue gay marriage licences by a thrice-divorced philanderer who fathered children by one man while married to another. The issue isn't really gay marriage (a divisive issue unto itself), but that's what it's turned in to. The hypocrisy of this lady claiming that gays getting hitched ruins the sanctity of marriage has turned the issue into a three ring circus featuring clowns of all varieties (Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, anyone?).

This brings me to the subject line of this post. Showcasing common-sense conservative values has become almost impossible thanks to the ridiculous amount of Republicans vying for the Presidential nomination. When there are 16 or 17 folks up there, it's hard enough for we conservatives to make a choice, let alone those in the mush-ball middle who may or may not vote Republican. Two have since exited the race: I liked Texas Governor Rick Perry, but losing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was no real loss at all to me.

The orange-tinted overgrown Oompa Loompa still leads many polls, but I question the validity of those numbers. We have a strong female candidate in Carly Fiorina, who is gaining but whose professional past is posing difficulties. Governor Jeb Bush is a viable candidate but is plagued both by his name and lack of excitement. And the list goes on and on and on...

I do like Dr. Ben Carson. He's been gaining in the polls and he has a lot of common-sense ideas. His professional reputation is impeccable and he's the embodiment of the American Dream: that despite coming from the hardest neighborhoods and having the odds stacked against them, a person can become a success if he or she is willing to work hard for what they want.

Now, is he the perfect candidate? No, and none of them are. In reality, the only people who see someone as an ideal candidate is the individual running. No candidate will likely ever stand 100% for my values unless I run for office myself. For now, though, he's the candidate for me.