THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama”

One of the striking similarities between George W. Bush and John McCain is their blatant contempt for education and “thinking” in general. It amazes me that the Republican Party wants the US of A to be led by dunces for twelve consecutive years.

George graduated from Yale with a “C” average.  George’s father and grandfather were also Yale graduates and they had donated thousands of dollars to the school prior to Georges admission. After his graduation, and just before his draft number came up in the SSS lotto, he applied for acceptance into the Texas Air National Guard as a “Jet Fighter Pilot.” This was to keep him out of Viet Nam. George had no prior pilot training. No one other than George had ever been seriously considered for that position without an aviation background including a pilot’s license. George took a competitive “Pilot Aptitude Exam” for one of the four pilot slots that had opened up in the Texas Guard. Only the “best of the best of the best” were to be selected. George scored a whopping 25% on the exam. (It’s interesting that he “happened to score exactly 25%, because a score of 24% or less would have completely eliminated him from any consideration for the slot.) But, regardless of this technicality, “the worst of the worst of the worst” was accepted into the program, taught to fly an airplane – eventually a jet, and awarded the position as a commissioned officer … all at the taxpayers’ expense. I guess it helps a little when your father is a wealthy US Congressman from Texas.

Both John McCain’s father and grandfather were Admirals in the US Navy. John decided that he wanted to continue the family military tradition and applied for admission into the U.S Naval Academy. He was accepted. (I haven’t seen any information about his academic record in high school, so I have no idea whether he earned his slot, or was admitted because the two generations ahead of him attained the highest pay grades possible in the Navy. But, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he earned the admission based on his prior academic record.)

John went on to graduate from Annapolis. He didn’t quite finish Magna cum Laude (like Barack Obama finished Harvard), in fact, there were 899 cadets in Johns’ graduation class. John finished fifth from the bottom … a truly prophetic number for John. He went on to complete pilot training. His favorite pastimes were driving his Corvette, drinking, dating strippers and gambling. His performance in flight school was considered dismal at best. But, who’s going to challenge your conduct and academic performance in the Navy with all of that brass on your dad and grand pappy?  The plane that got shot down in Nam was not his first crash … or his second … or his third … or his fourth … BUT, HIS FIFTH CRASH. That’s five military jets destroyed with John McCain as the pilot-in-command??? Oh my God!

I recently retired with twenty one years as a federal Air Traffic Controller and prior time as a controller in the US Navy. I took flying lessons as a young man and completed my first solo flight with less than nine hours of dual time. I have quite a background in aviation and let me tell you, finding any pilot with FIVE crashes under his belt is quit rare – for any military or civilian pilot. (The only exception would possibly be for test pilots.) John was never a test pilot. Perhaps if John had really applied himself, cracked the books, and he had actually “tried” to achieve a minimal level of competence he wouldn’t have cost the Treasury Department the millions of dollars associated with his five military jet crashes.

Can’t they do any better than this?

She has no experience. She was governor of Alaska (pop. About 600k) for a year and a half. She’s already under two ethics investigations, with which she refuses to cooperate. She was mayor of a tiny Alaskan town, and she was so terrible at it that not only did she almost face a recall, the city forced her to hire an administrator to do the actual work. 
Before that, she was a sports journalist with a degree from the University of Idaho, gleaned after 5 years and 6 colleges, including the University of Hawaii. What a serious, dedicated student. Clearly she has the educational background to understand not just the complexities of one of the largest economies in the world, but also the political problems that exist not just between us and the Islamic world, but us and Russia and us and…well, everybody else, right?

Wrong. She’s already admitted she doesn’t even know what a Vice President does, or anything about the War in Iraq and what’s been going on. She knows nothing about the economy, the military (has not even made a single decision while being Commander in Chief of Alaska’s National Guard)—and no, being near Russia does NOT mean that you have foreign policy experience. 

2.

Her pro-life stance. We can argue back and forth for the rest of our lives as to whether life starts at conception, but let’s face it: at this point, no one has the right to anyone else to succumb to their viewpoint. Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. You don’t have to right to make that decision for other people.
Oh and she’s so pro-life that when her water broke while she was pregnant with her fifth, down-syndrome suffering child at the age of 44, she not only went on to give a speech at a convention but then to wait around a couple hours, get on a plane to Alaska for an 8 hour flight (without notifying the airline that she was pregnant and about to deliver), then took an hour drive to a hospital that didn’t have an NICU. What kind of mother does that in her situation? Her excuse? “I wanted my baby to be born in Alaska.” Well that’s great. With the plethora of life-threatening ailments than can befall a baby with down-syndrome who is being delivered a month early to a woman in her forties, at least if the poor baby had died in childbirth, he’d have died in Alaska and that’s how God would have wanted it. 

3.

Her views on abstinence-only education. Which clearly worked so well for her daughter, who is now being forced into marriage at the age of 17. We won’t even mention the fact that 60% of teenage marriages end in divorce within 15 years—I mean, after all, it’s not the plethora of divorces destroying marriage, it’s the gays.

4.

Speaking of gays, she also subscribes to the belief that gays can change their sexual preferences through the power of prayer, which is blatantly false. You’d think the large number of Republican males who’ve been outed as having gay lovers or caught having illicit trysts in the men’s room would be proof enough that clearly, it’s not the prayer—or lack of it—that’s the issue here. Saying someone could pray to be straight is like saying a black person could pray to be white. Hey, maybe that’s what did it for Michael Jackson!

5.

With all of this, she’ll be one heartbeat away from assuming the presidency, and McCain fans, don’t fool yourselves—the man has an 8% chance of making it through to the end of his presidency. 8%. Do you want to take that kind of chance when as of right now, no one even knows what her main goals and policies will be as VP? She spent her entire acceptance speech bashing Barack Obama—where were the issues? Oh, right—the Republican party has told her what they are yet. And clearly, if it’s not written on the back hide of a moose, there’s no reason she would already know.

As I look back and try to figure out how the worst man in recent history has become President twice and I try to understand how the most corrupt and ineffective political party in my lifetime has taken control of both branches of Congress, the White House and the USSC I have to say that the Green Party must take some of the blame.

While I agree with most of the Green Party aspirations – these truths remain self evident ……

The 2000 Election resulted in nearly 3,000,000 votes for the Green candidate, Ralph Nader. This would have been more than enough votes to put Al Gore in office despite Kathleen Harris’s interference.

In fact, in Florida alone, 97,488 votes went to Nader. Those votes would have put Gore over Bush in FL by about 97,000 votes and w would have never left Crawford. Based on the final election polls the election results surprised no one. The election was predicted by almost every pollster to be one of the closest Presidential races in American history and there was a lot of speculation that even a meager showing at the polls for the Green Party would swing the election for w.

The 2004 election was another disappointment from the Greens – although not as significant as the 2000 elections.

Nader disassociated himself from the Green Party and ran as in independent. The Green Party named David Cobb as their presidential candidate. Nader and Cobb attracted over a half a million votes – not enough to sway that election – granted. W had 3 years since 9-11 to poison America with his lies and instill fear into the population and corrupt politics by the 2004 election.

Sure, neither Gore nor Kerry was green enough for the Greens. (Hell, they weren’t quite green enough for me. Although, Gore is showing some environmental gonads now.)

It’s like the old game show. There are three curtains.

Behind curtain # 1 is an environmentally delightful candidate. But, he lacks the national recognition and experience to entice a majority of voters to elect him into office. In fact – he doesn’t stand a chance in hell of even taking 3% of the votes.

Behind curtain #2 is a progressive candidate who might not be as environmentally aggressive as you would wish. But, his party is comprised of others with beliefs almost paralleling yours and he will have the courage needed to stand up to pirates with no motivation except greed. And, this candidate stands a very good chance of winning.

Behind curtain #3 is Godzilla. He cares about nothing but power and greed. He whole heartedly pledges his allegiance to the pirates of oil companies, mining companies, the military-industrial complex and chemical interests – to name a few. He seeks to lower any environmental standard that would decrease corporate profit – regardless of any detrimental effects. He turned Texas into an environmental nightmare while he was governor there. He’d much rather see shareholders, CEO’s and his cronies divide the booty than see the common working man earn a decent wage.

Let’s see … myself …if I had to choose… I’d choose curtain #2.

The Green Party and Ralph Nader all but vanish during non-Presidential Election years. They don’t actively try to win city, county or state seats with very few exceptions. Their candidates are often funded in part by the GOP, especially in areas where a close race is occurring between a Democrat and a Republican.

I personally wish the Greens would assimilate into the Democratic Party and make it greener. But, as long as they continue to do nothing but divide the progressive votes and usher the GOP into power we should turn our back on them and let them die.