But the ability to hold a grudge a long, long, time is one of the defining features of a Winger.

Time doesn't stand still, and Conservatives and I have both changed. Conservatives have mutated into today's ugly form dominated by authoritarian conservatism, and I've simply mellowed with age. The combination results in the nostalgia for Classic Conservatives that I've expressed before. Or to put it more bluntly, there's nothing like the extremists in the GOP now to make me appreciate the respectable-by-comparison Conservatives of the past.

Pat Buchanan's one of the last of the Classics, or at least one of the few not keeping his head down, and I can understand how it isn't sitting well with him to be dismissed as a "paleoconservative". Yet, when I hear the term it conjures up names like Goldwater and Eisenhower, and they were class acts by an order of magnitude compared to DeLay (R-Indicted) and Frist and Santorum and the rest of their gang...and you know you don't want to get me started on Bush and his posse of incompetent ideologues.