With Your Background, Why Aren't You a Neocon?

An excellent question. For those of you who haven't read my profile, let me introduce myself. I'm a 47 year old white male, college educated, from the South, an ex Air Force officer and a businessman. I own a gun and know how to use it, having scored expert marksman in the military. I grew up in a fundamentalist church and was baptized. I snow ski. I was a Reagan Republican, in fact, it's his name on my commission. I'm an investor. With these factors in mind, one might think I'd be one of those who believe Bush is the second coming. Instead, I think our President needs a tin-foil hat and a good dose of some anti-schizophrenic drugs.

I lost the religion part rather early on. As I became educated and thought more about God and religion, it became apparent to me that if God were what I was taught, I probably didn't want to spend eternity with him. The Air Force indoctrination burnt away after the force reductions of 1992 - I was one of those laid off from service of my country. My German ex-wife and I decided to go back to Germany and there, I learned about socialism.

I can hear the hiss from any neocon reader at mention of the S-word. It's evil, right? Well, in some instances I'd agree with you. Germany's socialism and economy both began to feel real pain when the unions, backed by the socialistic government, forgot that their relationship with business was symbiotic. Once they learned from American unions and became obstructionist parasites, both the economy and the social system began to crumble. The things I liked about socialism was free education for any who could qualify for it, an educational system that acknowledged that not all were college material and educated those who weren't going to college appropriately and the low-cost health care for all. At some point I'll write about the German version of universal health coverage, one I was disappointed the Clintons didn't decide to model, but not now.

When I returned from Germany, I could see both the positives and the negatives of socialism and the positives were on the winning side. Not long after my return, Bush came to power. For reasons described by others elsewhere, I lost all faith in the Republican party to the point where I even went out stumping for Kerry in the last election. I didn't like Kerry from the start but to me, as to 48 percent of us, he was the lesser of the two evils.

All this has left someone who can see some of both sides of the liberal-conservative argument. I believe a vast number of Americans share liberal values but that the Democrats in leadership positions have done a poor job of communicating what our values are. Instead, they allow the right to "rebrand" us as the party of fringe groups, spinning our support of civil liberties in a perverse way. The marketing of the Right has been a long, painstaking process, one we have to understand for as Sun Zu wrote so many centuries ago, "Know your enemy and know yourself and in ten thousand battles you will always be victorious."