Just watched Mr Conservative: Goldwater on HBO

[Opusnone]

Highly recommended.
Mr. Conservative has gays in his family, past abortions, etc. just like everyone else.
Over time his politics were affected by these things and made him quite a statesman.
He hated Jerry Falwell.
He ended up, according to Walter Cronkite, being a Liberal.
I'll take him.

[whistle]

1. Sounds like revisionist history, had Barry Goldwater been elected

...president he would have used nuclear weapons against North Vietnam, China, North Korea and the USSR, of that there was no doubt. He also opened the flood gates for the religious right, Ronald Reagan and the neoconservatives. Although I have great respect for Walter Cronkite as a narrator and commentator, there was no way that Goldwater even with his dieing breath became partial to a liberal point of view. The man was always slightly to the right of Attila the Hun politically.

[INdemo]

3. If he hated Nixon,and advised John Dean to bury the lying bastard

with his senate testimony What would he do about W.....

[whistle]

7. Well, true, but that act in and of itself would not make Goldwater

....a liberal, although Nixon lovers (I'm holding back a gag reflex at that concept) would certainly label anyone not supporting Nixon as liberal as their knee jerk reaction. Goldwater was a conservative just like Hitler was a nazi.

Definitions of conservative:

resistant to change
opposed to liberal reforms

[VOX]

10. There was a terrific New Yorker profile of BG in April 1988, and he...

had indeed made some significant shifts toward the center from his 1964 "nutcase" stance. I wish I could quote from it, but it's unavailable to me now. I do recall that he referred to Ted Kennedy as "a great friend," and to Jesse Jackson as "a poet."

I did locate the following on Wikipedia, which is somewhat illustrative of the later-day Goldwater:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater
<snip>
After his retirement, in 1987, Goldwater described the conservative Arizona Governor Evan Mecham as "hardheaded" and called on him to resign, and two years later stated the Republican Party had been taken over by a "bunch of kooks." In a 1994 interview with the Washington Post the retired Senator said, "When you say 'radical right' today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye." He said about Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

In the 1990s he became more controversial because of statements that aggravated many social conservatives. He endorsed Democrat Karan English in an Arizona congressional race, urged Republicans to lay off Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and criticized the military's ban on homosexuals: "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar." He also said, "You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight." In 1996 he told Bob Dole, who mounted his presidential campaign with luke-warm support from hard-line conservatives, "We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?"
<snip>

[Maccagirl]

2. A complex man

He hated Nixon, adored JFK.

[ComerPerro]

4. There is NOTHING great or noble about "true" or "old-school" conservatism

[ThoughtCriminal]

5. Neo-cons make ANYBODY look like a saint

I'd take Goldwater over anybody still in the GOP today.

[ComerPerro]

6. If he was around he would be parading along with the "neoCons"

[ThoughtCriminal]

8. I would not assume that

One of the last political things that he did was to honk off the Arizona Republicans by endorsing a Democrat for Congress (Karan English in 1990) vs. a religious-right conservative.

[redqueen]

9. I need to record that for my conservative family members. n/t