Replies

The President signing CFR alienated many conservatives from the start. Sending the Feds into California to raid cannabis pharmacy's that the people of California voted to allow showed many conservatives that though Bush had said before his election that such issues were states right issues not federal ones, that he was willing to ignore the will of the voters of the state to impose a federal solution on the people against their will. . States rights proponents whatever their view on the WOD's were outraged.

For some conservatives the Patriot Act was a biggie...Saying that we needed this act to protect the people sounded hollow in light of Republicans opposition(rightly so) to the Clinton version of the PA that were enacted after the 1992 attack on the WTC. And where were the demands from Republicans for a PA to protect us from terrorists then. It was the same terrorists after all.

Many conservatives who had lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation all their lives in the cold war with the Soviet Union wondered how we survived that much more dangerous time without gutting the Bill of Rights. If we didn't need a PA for the Soviet Union and it's threat of suitcase nukes and 20,000 nuclear missiles aimed at us then we sure didn't need one for one conventional attack in one city which killed only a fraction of the Americans that die every day of the year. Why should such restrictions be put upon American civil liberties at a time when we refuse to even police our own borders and are still allowing middle eastern men of 911 profiles easy access to our country?

And that brings up another problem. War on terror? Terror is a tactic, not an enemy. After 911 Bush named the axis of evil as the enemy. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. No mention of Saudi Arabia which financed the terrorists and fund whabbisism terrorism...or Pakistan which hides the Saudi terrorists. The soft touch on the Crown Prince was unseemly and it seems the nutcases in NK and Iran are determined to call what they think is the Presidents bluff.. Americans support the war. They just want a defined enemy. War on Terror sounds much like War on Drugs. IOW, a never ending war of attrition with no clear enemy.

It looks to a lot of conservatives that Bush family personal dealings with what appear to be our enemy(Saudi Arabia ect.) has affected military policy and national security.

Like it or not polls showed the GOP was hammered over the Federal Executive intervention in the Schiavo case...Stem cells, flag burning, online poker...Harriet Myers?, and several other "family values" issues are just not at the top of most conservatives list of what to do first in order of importance. The religious right thought they were more then just a part of a coalition within the GOP and decided they were the power behind it. Libertarian and fiscal conservatives such as the ones which populated this site in large numbers in 1997-2000 were marginalized, insulted, banned and ridiculed in the GOP at all levels and such marginalization extended even here.

It was that faction which took the GOP to the woodshed last night. Such conservatives are unwilling to vote for any politician or party which runs on a platform of fear.