text: JD, glad to have your ideas and have missed them for awhile. You're incite is particularly good in what you have written.  While in my personal life, my medical residents always recognized my conservatism. I was willing to change but only after I had studied at least many of the ramifications of what the change meant.  Now people socially see me as a liberal because I am honest when I decry poor leaders such as our very own Catholic Bishops.  To be conservatives means to preserve things like human dignity and the environment, it does not mean materialism. Yet, our own culture and our own Catholic Bishops are using mammon as their God. One thing that Mr. Goldwater said about the neocons, "They are not conservatives and they are not right." I was not a great fan of Senator Goldwater but he had many more high and good principles than so many "so called" conservatives.  As a conservative I think I liked it better when  people did not have such a high opinion of the word conservative.