Conservatism’s feet of crumbled clay

NRO quotes Lee Edwards’ biography of Barry Goldwater:

When [Goldwater’s] daughter Joanne, not yet twenty and still in school, became pregnant with the child of her intended husband and told her father that she did not want to have the child, Goldwater said, “I’ll take care of it.” He arranged for Joanne to fly back to Washington and have a then-illegal abortion (it was 1955) in the converted dining room or a large three-story house in the suburbs. “I just want to prevent anyone from going through that,” says Joanne Goldwater, who admits that all three of her daughters have had abortions.

Is it any wonder that the conservative movement is so hapless when it comes to ending the atrocity of abortion? Even its iconic one-time leaders are hopelessly compromised… as is all too often the case, whatever their public protestations might be, they act as if they regard themselves beyond good and evil.

Don’t ever put your trust in men. Not Barry Goldwater, not Arnold Schwarzenegger, not George Bush or anyone else. The distance between a Winston Churchill and an Adolf Hitler is rather less than it appears. The whole point of libertarianism is to reduce the ability of flawed and evil men to exert control over the lives of other individuals.