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To: sam_paine

--On Barry Goldwater: Giuliani described John Kennedy as "great and brilliant. Barry Goldwater as an "incompetent, confused and sometimes idiotic man." New York Daily News, May 13, 1997


88 posted on 02/10/2007 4:38:02 PM PST by narses ("Freedom is about authority." - Rudolph Giuliani)
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To: narses
What is it about Barry Goldwater's blistering defeat, and subsequent ushering in of LBJ's Great Society disaster for America that you find so impressive?

From Wikiland---

After his retirement in 1987, Goldwater described the conservative Arizona Governor Evan Mecham as “hardheaded” and called on him to resign, and two years later stated that the Republican Party had been taken over by a “bunch of kooks.” In a 1994 interview with the Washington Post the retired senator said,“

Goldwater also had harsh words for his onetime political protege, President Reagan, particularly after the Iran-Contra Affair became public in 1986. Journalist Robert MacNeil, a friend of Goldwater's from the 1964 Presidential campaign, recalled interviewing him in his office shortly afterward. "He was sitting in his office with his hands on his cane...and he said to me, 'Well, aren't you going to ask me about the Iran arms sales?' It had just been announced that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran. And I said, 'Well, if I asked you, what would you say?' He said, 'I'd say it's the goddamn stupidest foreign policy blunder this country's ever made!'"[13]

Some of Goldwater's statements in the 1990s aggravated many social conservatives. He endorsed Democrat Karan English in an Arizona congressional race, urged Republicans to lay off Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and criticized the military's ban on homosexuals: “Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar.” He also said, “You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.” In 1996 he told Bob Dole, whose own presidential campaign received lukewarm support from conservative Republicans: “We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?” In response to Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell's opposition to the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, of which Falwell had said, “Every good Christian should be concerned,” Goldwater retorted: “I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.”[14]


99 posted on 02/10/2007 4:55:57 PM PST by sam_paine (X .................................)
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