zabouti@gmail.com's blog

BJ, when you first started running against David Price, George W Bush was still president of our country and the leader of your party.  You seemed different, a breath of fresh air - you talked about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and seemed to have some idea of the dangers of powerful government.  As a civil libertarian, I wanted to find out more about you, so I contacted you and we had a wonderful three-hour breakfast meeting where we seemed to agree on a lot of principles and issues.  After that we met once, perhaps twice, for more pleasant and stimulating conversations.  I even invited you to a liberal political group, where you impressed other liberals with your apparent earnestness and even with some of your ideas.

At one point I asked you why you belonged to the Republican Party.  You replied that the party was broken, ripe for takeover.   That sounded reasonable, given the ways that a Republican President and Congress had tossed away a budget surplus and gone to war against a country that hadn't attacked us.  That Republican Party is dangerous, I said, and you seemed to agree.