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On the first wife front, many men are tone deaf but you are right. Anyone who has reviewed what are called actualities in candidate polls (open-ended questions like what are the three things you hate most about Senator McCain) will turn up many women who will resent that sort of betrayal of a loyal but physically weakened first wife and, most particularly, if the big deal is the decline in superficial looks due to the advance of age that affects us all. The good husband values the scars of age in his wife as having been sustained in her devotion to their marriage and to him. Stretch marks, crow's feet, worry lines, some extra inches at the waistline, a sag or two???? So what, at worst? Thank you, dearest, more likely. It isn't as though McCain or most any other husband improves physically by the passage of many years after marriage.

Many women have no use for powerful men seeking trophy second wives. They rightly regard such men as immature nancy boys who are not to be trusted.

You and I have often disagreed and have done so on this thread. Nonetheless, you have put your finger on an indisputable truth. Watch for a high correlation between support for abortion and other social revolutionary themes by men and their lack of concern for the dumping of first wives, not for character flaws or for any cognizable moral failing, but for mere superficial looks. There are many reasons to be socially conservative and preservation of a just social order is an important one.

Also, as an expatriate New Englander familiar with New Hampshire in the last few decades, I note that you have also put your finger on New Hampshire accurately. The problem there is that airhead Boston liberals and libertarians have ruined the Boston area and now have moved to New Hampshire to flee Massachusetts taxes while desiring the lifestyle leftism of Vermont and of Barney Frank. Bill Loeb is dead for some time and soon New Hampshire will be no more just as the real Vermont is now just the Northeast Kingdom of ancestral dairy farmers and outnumbered by the devotees of Bernie Sanders, Jumping Judas Jeffords and Patrick Leahy.

Please accept this tribute to your insight in several; respects on this matter.

re: Thank you, dearest, more likely. It isn't as though McCain or most any other husband improves physically by the passage of many years after marriage.)))

Well said. And, to put a crueler point on it, McCain is not exactly long on physcial. charisma himself. Bush's appeal to the ladies is a wholesome but undeniably vigorous one--active, loyal, steadfast. McCain turns his face when the camera comes around, trying to show his "good" side. His demeanor is frail when he's not gloating over his latest betrayal of conservatives, trying to score points with the MSM. Perhaps he can be of use as a distraction as we groom a better prospect...

He just doesn't have the juice. By 08, he'll be nearing his mid-seventies.

As for the neocons, I took pains to draw attention to the intellectual "wing"--I don't know that there's anything else to be concerned with. I invite you to do a long read by googling (or dogpiling) up "Balkan neoconservative" and "balkan neoconservative Kristol" for some rather alarming reading of the attitudes and philosophical foundations of these elitists. You don't have to be a paleo to distrust the neo literati--