It is fascinating to read this thread.

There is a saying that “a miracle is just a change in perception”.

I hope you-all will forgive me a moment’s smugness; the long timers now know how much I love being right, and I can’t resist a little bit of it. I had an AuH2O button in 1964, then like most every other 11 year old I came down with socialism.

I broke from my childhood socialism much earlier than most of you: I lost it when I read Atlas Shrugged in eighth grade. That would have been 1968/69.

I was helped in this by having relatives who had been in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, some of whom who had escaped from Kadár Janós and the Russians in 1956.

By the time I was really interested in politics in 1971 I had already begun to notice that my libertarian leanings, and the whole notion of “liberty”, was considered … ill-mannered, maybe? However one might phrase it, it was a social faux pas to admit to anything but Jane Fonda leftism.

Even then, though, I was aware that there was an essential point these folks were missing, which was that all of the things they claimed to be fighting for were things they wouldn’t have in the places they claimed to admire, like North Viet Nam, Cuba, the “People’s Republic” of China, and the Soviet Union.

Oh, and I noticed that damn few of them moved to those places unless they did so on the run from the law.

The confusing thing, for me, was that we all claimed to admire the same values: individual liberty; freedom of speech; religious freedom; racial and sexual equality. Why couldn’t they see that the place that offered the most of these — not perfection, but the best environment — was the USA?

Hence a certain feeling of smugness now, as my cohort of 50 year olds has these people seeing, at last, that if we don’t have quite the “shining city on the hill”, we’ve at least managed, unlike most other places in history, to begin to drain the goddamned swamp.

Now, please don’t be insulted by my moment of smugness: it’s just a passing thing. Instead, realize what an astounding, awe-inspiring step you’re really taking: what you’re seeing is how few people ever really do manage to learn to think for themselves, and unlike some of us old “conservatives”, you’re doing it relatively late in life.

This is really an astonishing thing, and you should all take a moment for deserved self-congratulation.

What I like best about Bush, over anyone other than Reagan in my lifetime (and I figured this out about Reagan far too late) is that he’s the candidate who is continuing to argue that buying people cans of mosquito repellant isn’t enough: to be safe, we have got to drain the damned swamp.