"always a right-wing republican"
My hat is off to those of you who were smart enough not to be taken in.
When I heard that "you should learn from your mistakes," I took that to mean that the best way to learn the most was to make every conceivable mistake.
Hah!! It's guys like you who had the intellectual honesty to see the light who really deserve the credit. To paraphrase a currently popular slogan, I was stuck on Conservative. No effort was involved!