Confessions of a Battered Conservative, or, Why is the World Fricken Crazy?

My first memory of politics was when I was five. I remember asking my dad about it. It’s been too long ago, I don’t remember why I was thinking about it. Perhaps there was an ad, or something on the news. At any rate, I asked Dad who he was voting for. His response was “Jimmy Carter, because he’s a farmer, and we need a farmer for President.” Four years later he would be cussing Carter a blue streak, praising Reagan to high heaven, and vociferously voting Republican the rest of his life.

Since I was a child, and basically believed almost everything my parents said as gospel truth, I thought that Jimmy Carter was the biggest moron. But, I don’t any more. I’ve grown up. He may in fact have been the wrong person for the Presidency at that time, but I now believe he is an honest, intelligent man who had our countries best interests at heart. But we all know what the path to Hell is paved with…..

The years when I formed my stoic go down swinging philosophy were dominated by Ronald Reagan. For the first year or two I thought he could do no wrong. The hostages that were taken in Iran (I thought) due to Jimmy Carter’s weakness had been released. In my mind, of coarse it was because they feared Reagan. Now I realize that, while there may have been an element of fearing Reagan, there was surely some of it due to Carter’s negotiations. But I was a child, I didn’t know.

I concede, now that I am grown, he made mistakes. Frankly, he made profound mistakes. The bank closures of the early eighty’s and the Iron Contra affair frankly were just plain stupid. And in my humble opinion, our country never did recover from the bank closures. I know my family never did.

Yet we always loved Reagan. And honestly, I still do. I love him for three reasons.

• 1. He built our military back up from the depressing state it had been in in the seventies to the state of the art dominant military that rolled through Iraq so quickly (only to be bogged down there by bad politics).
• 2. He kept a tough stance but was yet willing to negotiate. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve always felt had he not been President, the Cold War would not have ended in my lifetime. Though for all I know maybe he just extended our life a few decades.
• 3. In my lifetime, the only President who even came close to being so able to touch the heart of the American people as well was maybe Bill Clinton. His speeches were the most iconic, most well written and well delivered of any President since Kennedy.

Here is a fairly well balanced site that gives an evaluation that will help anybody who doesn’t know much about Reagan a good idea of what he was like.

https://reagan.procon.org/

I went to collage during the administration of George H. W. Bush. I don’t want to be a Bush basher here, but for whatever reason, he rarely touched the heart strings the way Reagan could do. Whether there is an art to winning the hearts of the people and Bush didn’t have it, or whether we are all just shallow and like how handsome Reagan was, Bush just didn’t have the same amount of love from the American people. I started to change some of my thoughts with the things I was learning in collage. I was just learning how to learn, and learning that some of my pat ideas of youth were wrong was harsh. I started to become more and more liberal….and then….

I got sick. I tried to reconcile with my father. That ended up being a mistake. But there was one thing that I was introduced to that again changed my thinking, and turned me into a staunch conservative.

This post is running long, I’ll write more about the evolution of my political thought in a later post (unless my readers want me to write about something else). If you want to know who influenced me in the nineties, stay tuned….