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Ok, this guy favors personal choice, responsibility and self-determination. To this end he is moving over to a party that wants to meddle in all sorts of personal choices to a greater degree than any US government before, often trampling states' rights in the process (medical pot, gay sex, euthanasia, etc ad nauseum). He's going to a party that talks about freedom and self-determination abroad while quietly supporting or tolerating undemocratic allies the world over. (Not that this is a new policy, both parties have pursued this for decades).

This is your typical straw-man argument against leftist thought, throwing out ludicrous sounding examples, most of them out of context and nearly all of them misinterpreted. He offers no constructive alternatives.

He also does nothing to dissect the arguments against the significance of the Iraqi elections. Months later there are indeed legitimate criticisms. While elections are a powerful symbolic gesture, what good is a government that operates in secrecy, has little or no discernible power and brings about less, rather than more security? The US is still the only significant source of military power in Iraq, by our own admission. And if we understand a government as those who posess "A monopoly on the legitimate use of force," (to put it in Weber's terms), there is literally no government in Iraq at this time.

I, too, have a ton of quarrels with the cultural left in this country. But this doesn't push me to the right; only a superficial mind sees my reaction against the fuzzy-thinking, self-absorbed feel-goodism of our so-called left as a 'right wing' reaction. Rather I have been pushed further left, until some of my views almost seem to come full circle into conservatism.

NT