Give me liberty. Or give me liberty, a bottle of The Macallan® single malt scotch, and a Montecristo No. 2 cigar.

As you may have been able to gather, I am what you would call a P.J. O'Rourke conservative. That is, I'm not a traditional conservative or a neo-conservative. I'm a conservative libertarian. Or make that a libertarianist conservative, since every thing I believe is colored first and foremost by a single overarching concept: liberty. That's what this country is founded on. Everything else is fudge or buttercream icing with marzapan roses or whatever one's additional political beliefs may be.

So you certainly won't find me siding with the moralistas here very often, since much of what they believe is centered upon their view that they can impinge my liberty by foisting their moral views upon me. And you won't find me falling into lockstep with the Bushie crowd all the time either, since I'm not particularly keen on any one who heads up a giant federal government apparatus.

Let me put it in a nutshell: I don't want government telling me what I can and cannot do insofar as it doesn't have any direct, immediate, and negative impact on "domestic tranquility" or the "public welfare." See U.S. Const. preamble (“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity . . . .”).

I'm originally from New York, having lived in Manhattan deep into adulthood, and maintain a love-hate affair with my native city. Hate, because it such a bastion of appalling and unapologetic liberalism. Love, because, in spite of everything, it is the greatest city in the world.

Also, I speak fluent Spanish, have traveled frequently to South America, and many of those near and dear to me are legal immigrants and/or Hispanic U.S. citizens (what do you expect? I live in Miami now). So while I'm by no means on the side of illegal immigrants, I do take some umbrage at the bashing people receive here simply by dint of their having a Spanish name or speaking Spanish. If you do this kind of thing, you're an ignoramus who needs to take a trip to Miami, which is overbrimming with conservative Republican Hispanics.

By the way, yes, I am a lawyer, and a damned good one, too, if I may say so myself. So if you're a nonlawyer or a not very good lawyer, and you've been making benighted pronouncements about the law, well, you've been duly warned.