You Live, you Learn -

You Live, you Learn - It's not a secret - I was Democrat until I was about twenty or so. I wrote a party platform for 1980 North Dakota Boy's State that reads like a Leninist call to action.

Reading Solzhenitzyn's "Gulag", Paul Johnson's "Modern Times", and PJ O'Rourke's various essays (and "Republican Party Reptile") started a short but intense swing to the right that I'm still living.

But I did manage to retain one vestige of my former left-wing self; in high school, I saw Phyllis Schlafly on TV several times, and read some of her stuff - and, as a knee-jerk leftist, hated her. I regarded her as a doddering old ninny, as Jerry Falwell without the jowls. That was, of course, the impression that was more or less foisted on me by my liberal friends, acquaintances and family members - and of course, the left is all about denigration rather than engagement.

And it only recently occurred to me to even try to change my own mind about Ms. Schlafly. I read some of her writing. And I finally realized - 20 years late - what Ann Coulter tells us today.

Overpowered By Gore - Jonah Goldberg on the near-inevitability of another Gore candidacy.