Gut-check time

I have noted before how difficult it is to pigeonhole people politically. I am a particularly difficult case: a strong social liberal/fiscal conservative, I tend to side with the social conservatives when it comes to law and order issues. This federal election is putting my two sides at war with each other.
It's a Gordian knot, and my usual solution to Gordian knots is just to saw right through the things. Normally, I'd come up the middle and vote Liberal: since the Progressive Conservatives no longer exist, the right wing of the Liberal Party is the closest fit for me, politically speaking. But the mere thought of voting Liberal this time out fills me with revulsion. Until this campaign, I've never felt the urge to deface lawn signs. But every time I pass one of those bright red warning beacons urging me to RE-ELECT the Liberal candidate in my riding, I have to fight down a compulsion to grab a marker and scrawl HOW COULD YOU across the top of it.
I mean, seriously. Every time Paul Martin says he'll do something (and he'll do anything! ANYTHING!), I sit back and think to myself: okay, you say you'll do thus-and-such. Your party's been in power for twelve long years. Why haven't you done thus-and-such yet? Especially when it comes to promises about national daycare programs that date all the way back to 1993. Or what about the GST? Just when were you planning to get around to scrapping that, Paulie?
I've been paying very close attention to Stephen Harper this time out. I have never considered him the boogeyman that the Liberals and their sheepdog media have in the past, but I wasn't entirely sure about him. It's nothing to do with his flinty, unsmiling nature...in fact, that in itself is more attractive to me as a voter than Jack Layton's somehow oily smile, that shiteating grin of his that puts one in mind of used car salesman.
It's Harper's policies. Predictably, I like the law-and-order package he proposes. But he's out to lunch when it comes to drugs...he actually wants to recriminalize marijuana, as if our cops don't have more pressing things to do with their time.
For the most part, though, Harper has run a disciplined, error-free campaign to this point. In fact, it's the Liberals who are plagued with recurring RCMP investigations and aides who have developed a taste for their own feet. Scott Reid's infamous 'beer and popcorn' quip was just one in a very long string of Liberal mis-steps.
I'm withholding final judgment until the end of tomorrow night's debate, but I think the fiscal conservative has won out. Many would have said it was a foregone conclusion, but on the contrary, I actually struggled with the notion to vote NDP. In the end, I couldn't support a party whose solution to our health care morass is to do everything we've been doing wrong over the past twelve years, only more of it...and if the NDP are, sas the saying goes, "Liberals in a hurry", and the Liberals have stolen so much of our money over their regime, what will Jacky-boy do? Now that scares me.