I do believe now that I am an older voter that it matters very much what you believe. It is true to say that there will always be two sides (or maybe 3 or 4) to every issue but if it doesn't matter then why bother? That is where our passion comes from even though we often change our minds. I realize looking back at my polical journey, I didn't always have the perspective and life experience to know what was important and I came to believe that my trust was misplaced several times.

I was greatly affected by Bill Clinton as were you, Rosemary, in a negative way after voting for him. I was pretty naive and spent 8 years enduring his administration before my vision became clearer and a great deal more mature and realistic (at least I hope it is).

Because Clinton was such a huge disappointment to me personally, I,too, can thank him for pushing me towards forming my own political opinions instead of just "liking" a politician and being influenced more by "charisma" than anything else about him or her. I'm skeptical and more descerning, determined to really spend some time and energy in understanding the issues. Of course, I was dramatically effected by 9/11 and discovered that national security and foreign affairs are paramount issues for me now.

Discovering the blogosphere is an outgrowth of my new interest in current events. The discussions I find on this site and several others are stimulating and informative, keeping me searching and thinking for myself. Thanks to the Esmays and the many rather intelligent contributors here for their thoughtful and insightful commentary. And thanks to Clinton my eyes have been opened.

Admittedly I've only been reading your blog for two weeks or so, but this is thi9ng you yours I've read. I'm glad someone can look at this fairly.

I have to admit, I was once a barking moonbat for Harry Browne. I didn't work on his campaign but I did contribute a substantial (for me) chunk of money to it, and I put libertarian slogans in my Usenet sig, which makes me cringe just to think about it.

You know, it really helps me to understand and relate to the moonbats to know that most of them are just young and enthusiastic and that they will pass through this phase and eventually become reasonable. It's something that I knew from personal experience, but in my annoyance, I'd lost sight of that. Thanks for reminding me.

The problem is there will always be new barking moonbats coming into political awareness. I keep getting older but they stay the same age! Except for the ones who don't grow out of it -- living in Seattle, I know a few. But I can cut them a little more slack because I was once like that.

Well, I confess, I used to mostly believe in the 'Invisible Government' run by the CFR. I wondered why we were doing such obviously stupid things (back in Carter's days), and I attributed it to malice and conspiracy.

Well, I still think there is some malice and conspiracy, but its not a grand conspiracy, and stupidity and blind egotism are better explanations, and in fact some of the people I disagree with are not wrong on principle, they just have a wrong emphases.

And most people, even Kucinich's Krowd think they are doing the right thing. That's why we have principles because they guide us from an excessively individualistic understanding of morality. ("It's good for me and my friends, so it must be good.")

Tadeusz

'course I was about twelve when I believed in the 'Invisible'; and fifteen when I was Libertarian, and later I became a Radical Conservative, and dropped out after Gingrich's Revolution did not pan out, and now a bit muddled and more conciliatory, yet at the same time harsher to extreme idiots, and a happy Bush supporter.

I guess I'm the odd one out here, I was never anyone's barking moonbat. My "early warning radar system" tends to kick in very, very quickly, turning me off to moonbattery wherever I encounter it.

Going off to college in the mid 70s turned me off very quickly to campus Leftism, and turned me from a moderate Eisenhower Republican to a much more hardcore, National-Review-reading conservative.

Arriving in the late 80s at Duke University turned me off very, very quickly to political correctness, a phenomenon of which Duke was an epicenter. I remember discussing this with someone, after we both had been there two years. He remarked that he had just recently realized that the tactics of the politically correct on campus "didn't prove that they were right, but were more like a machine gun which can be wielded by anyone and aimed at anything." I said, "Oh, really? I realized that within the first two weeks I was here."

Not that I was ever in danger of being mistaken for Mr. Young Establishmentarian. As a young fellow, I had my own ways of being a lunatic— but they were highly individualistic ways, and not copied from that mass-produced nonconformity which I like to call "nonconformity for the millions, everybody different exactly alike."

Even now that I'm older and have mellowed considerably, you couldn't meet me in person without realizing instantly that, in many ways, I'm a holdover from the culture of the 1960s. But I was never anybody's barking moonbat.

From youth on up, I have always instinctively despised what H.L. Mencken dismissed as "the Uplift." I react to any unbridled enthusiasm, "caring," or "excitement about the future"— whatever its ideological flavor— by checking, first, whether my pocket is being picked; and, second, what kind of coercive regime of do-goodery is in the offing.

If all that's true, I propose raising the voting age to 35.

I have to confess that I was an outright Commie in my junior high school years (1967-1970). My hero was Eugene V. Debs, but I was actually a ----ing Commie. Around my first year in high school, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche, then Oswald Spengler, then Ayn Rand, and then other anti-Communist, non-Leftist, Rightist, libertarian, conservative, and reactionary thinkers, and also divserse ideological spectrums. Since then, I have often described myself as "so far to the Far Right I'm on the Far Left and so far to the Far Left I'm on the Far Right". After 9/11/2001, I got so sick of what the Left had become that I adopted an implicit "pas d'ennemi a Droite" (no enemy on the Right) attitude. But, when I saw so many on the Right, including so many I had up to then respected, defending Santorum, I realized my mistake, and I have since concluded that a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional spectrum is no longer a luxury but a necessity for me.

Howard Dean got the Democrats' blood to boilin.

Oh, and, by the way: Hail to the creator of this thread! HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL!!!! HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL GOOD!!!! HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL!!!!

Hey.

Stephen.

If you keep hitting on my wife like that, I just might have to kill you.

Just so you know. ;-)

Just so you know, there are quite a number of barking moonbats who NEVER grow up. Michael Moore. Barbra Streisand, Ted Turner, Tim Robbins and his hag wife. I've personally had e-mail discussions with a listserv full of true Bush-knew-about-9/11-before-it-occurred moonbats who were beyond draftable age (at least 30, some as old as 70).

To paraphrase someone famous: Gov. Dean, I lived under Bill Clinton's administration, I remember his campaign, I watched his rise to grandeur and his fall to buffoonery, and Gov. Dean, you're no bill Clinton.

I think John Edwards is today's Bill Clinton. He speaks with his heart and oozes with sincerity. He just needs to fine tune a few elements of his presentation and he's a dead ringer.

I've actually taken the opposite road in my political views. I was a conservative Reagan supporter in college but became a democrate AFTER I joined the Army in 1990. Dean's World has given me the education that college never could - a diverse group of (mostly) intelligent, sincere, and often humorous insight into our society. However, I'm in agreement with Ara on most issues.

Dean:
"Hey.

Stephen.

If you keep hitting on my wife like that, I just might have to kill you.

Just so you know. ;-)"

I was just thinking something along those lines before I read that. What I was thinking was: Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy! or: Girl, oh, girl, oh, girl! If she gets this from me, some schmoe out here in Washington (the state not the Death Star), imagine what she's getting from The Man himself!
I just figured that the wonderful lady who put my name up in bold letters deserves all the gratitude and screaming adulation I can give her. And, welcome back, Rosemary! Don't ever think we don't appreciate you. But I think I'll start turning that obligation of obeisance over to The Good Dean now. Let him worship the Q.O.A.E. while I worship.... OK? Anyway...

Rosemary got me to thinking of history again. That was a most interesting parallel she drew. Evil Dean in 2004, Clinton in 1992, RFK in 1968, JFK in 1960.
At the time President Kennedy was shot, I was in 3rd grade and had no ideological leanings, I thought of the President as sort of like the Pharaoh. The "we must go to the Moon" speech was inspiring to me, but that's because I was into spaceships and aliens anyway. I later fell in love with L. Frank Baum's Oz books, and then, a couple years later, with Egyptian mythology and then all other mythologies from Norse to Hawaiian. I didn't start thinking ideologically until around my junior high years, and then, as I said, I was a Platonist Communist for a while.
My father's first vote was for Adlai Stevenson. For my grandfather (on my mother's side), it was FDR. Both my parents and our family generally were liberal.

Something else I was thinking about here: Most people who have any ideological orientation whatsoever (which is not the same as most people) tend to start out more or less Leftish in their youths and then move to some kind of more or less Rightish position as they get older. "Left" and "Right" take several books on spectrums to try to define. Working definitions I use are derived from Professor Jean A. Laponce's "Left and Right: the Topography of Political Perceptions", "Right" being associated with religion, hierarchies, and continuity, "Left" with secularism, equality, and discontinuity.

Another spectrum, more relevant perhaps to this discussion of most people moving Right as they get older, is that of Thomas Sowell in his "A Conflict of Visions". People tend to start in their youths with an "unconstrained", optimistic, utopian vision, and then, as they get older, gravitate toward a more "constrained", realistic, empirical, or pessimistic, view, stressing the limitations of human nature ("Original Sin" in the Christian formulation). In other words, from Rousseau to Burke or Hobbes. That's the classic pattern.

I've sort of deviated from that classic pattern in that my vision is more what Sowell calls a "hybrid" one. I see in man, and in woman, enormous possibilities for both good and evil, we can be Godlike or demonic but never merely animal. We either rise above or sink below the rest of creation. I'm anti-utopian, not because I think Utopia is impossible, but because every Utopia I've read of would be Hell to live in for me. B. F. Skinner's "Walden II". I want Freedom and Dignity instead. _That_ is _my_ ideal. And I will settle for nothing less.

Dave Barry's explanation of Reagan's economic policies got me hooked on politics whem I was about 12. We had Newsweeks around the house but they are far less informative.

Dean's World has given me the education that college never could - a diverse group of (mostly) intelligent, sincere, and often humorous insight into our society. However, I'm in agreement with Ara on most issues.

Er, I think that was a compliment?

I don't know Ara. After the nice compliments - he threw in that word "however" when referring to you....

Bryan forgot Ed Asner, Moonbat extrodinaire and emeritus. I agree very much with Stephen's comments. I started out at a very young age as a liberal probably at 8 or 9. Now I'm a Republican who voted for Bush and will vote for him again. I changed when I realized that the left-wing extremists scared me more than the rigth-wing extremists. Now, that is not exactly true because I really did come to believe with great conviction that the Democratic platform and agenda was diametrically opposed to my true core beliefs in many important ways. And that I found myself in agreement with the Republicans on many major issues.

It's true that some moonbats never outgrow it; however, they're a small minority unlikely to foul up any elections. Raising the voting age to 35 is fine by me. Hell, I'll go as high as 37.

I used the word "however" to contrast the fact that Dean and Ara nearly always disagree. It was a compliment of sorts, or maybe just a personal observation. When I'm torn on an issue or just plain ignorant, I'll look for differing views (throwing out the obvious insane ones), and I usually wind up with an opinion akin to Ara's (or James Carville's). Dean's World just provides the inspiration to seek the "truth."

Raise the voting age to 37? Raise it to 50 or 60! -- I'm still in my 40s (49 now). Definitely all Senators should be 60 or older. That's what the word "Senate" means, meant in ancient Rome: "seniors", "elders", "the Old Wise Ones" Our Founding Fathers got most of their ideas on government from ancient Greece and Rome, as well as from the ancient Anglo-Saxons.

...as Steven Malcolm in the middle of putting his ass hat firmly atop his gun-loving blowfish eating head. Funny thing would be elders that can't wait that last year and get a fake I.D. in order to vote or run for office. Personally, I'd lower the voting age to 17 years and 3 months.