paying-attention

This week the Huffington Post has dueling op-eds from the Goldwater family. First, granddaughter CC Goldwater weighed in with why her grandfather, an old-fashioned libertarian-style conservative, would be unlikely to vote for Republican John McCain this year.

Then, today, Barry Goldwater, Jr. (CC's uncle) had his say in a piece titled "Why Barry Goldwater Couldn't Support Obama." I was going to post a comment on the Huffington Post site, but they keep losing my login. So here is what I think, based on the two Goldwater columns:

If Barry Goldwater, Sr., was alive today, I would like to think that he would be among the people who had been keeping the GOP from becoming the hyper-partisan, religious right, borrow and spend smear machine that it has become in the past twenty years. I would like to think that the small government ideals espoused by Ron Paul would still get respect from the mainstream of the party. I would like to think that John McCain would have been elected president eight years ago, retaining his own deeply held views on personal freedom and national defense, instead of being forced into this total sell-out that he has gone through in the last four years.

This year it has been tough to remember, but I started out as a Republican myself. Actually, my first registration was as a Socialist Worker but that was because there were some really attractive men in the SWP. We all have sins to answer for in our youth.

I was never a Democrat, and I'm still not. As far as I know, being a Republican does not mean I'm required to vote for whatever people or policies that the current party bigwigs choose to impose. I think that was what CC Goldwater was trying to say. If I order a green shirt on the internet and they send me a black one, I'll send it back for a refund. That doesn't mean I'm rejecting the color green. If I am in favor of small government and personal privacy and my GOP government sends me bedroom monitors and the Patriot Act, I'm not picking up that tab either.

I was interested to see what CC's uncle had to say about the current GOP candidates and why we should choose them over Obama and Biden. As far as I could tell, he was telling me to wear the black shirt in support of party unity. Party unity? They threw people like me out years ago. Meanwhile, the Democratic store over there is selling some pretty nice green clothes.

Labels: Barack Obama, Barry Goldwater, CC Goldwater, John McCain, The Huffington Post