My take on K-Hammer: he’s one of the sharpest knifes in the conservative toolbox, and he’s reliably incisive when it comes to issues with little or no moral component. And he’s not too bad on a lot of those which have a signficant moral component.
But because he has no religious beliefs, on those issues which have a strong moral dimension (such as abortion), like most humanists, his views reflect an ethical foundation built on sand. A belief in a higher power isn’t essential to view things like abortion as an insult to human dignity (pro-lifers don’t come any stronger than the atheist Nat Henthof), but it is a lot tougher to come to that position absent the ethical grounding of theistic belief system.
But I do respect him more than just about any humanist going because he’s so intellectually honest - I think that’s what really honks him off about Obama. In addition, unlike most humanists, he has a real respect for religiously-based viewpoints he disagrees with, provided they’re expressed in an intelligent and non-doctrinaire fashion. Try to dig up some of his other impressions of his work on Bush’s ethics commission - he’s uniformly fair and respectful of all reasonable views, and (again) very complementry of Bush’s wisdom in these matters.
He demonstrates perfectly why Libertarian ≠ Conservative.