I'm okay being middle-of-the-road.(THE LAST WORD)

I'm just your average, everyday, middle-of-the-road John Bircher. 1 never would have thought that those phrases "middle-of-the-road" and "John Bircher" would have become popular synonyms, but more and more of my acquaintances --Republicans and Democrats alike--have called me a "moderate" over the past couple of years.

I'm content with being in the middle of the road now, but the first time someone called me a moderate, I took the remark as an accusation. In the 1980s and 1990s, I got quite comfortable with being called "far right" because people in the middle of the road, I had been told, get hit by traffic going both ways. And I liked to say that all you find in the middle of the road are dead skunks and long yellow streaks.

When my acquaintances started accusing me of being a moderate, I began to ask myself if I had gone soft. Had 1 changed? Had the insidious left-wing coaxed me over to the "dark side"?

After counting down my long-held principles in favor of less government, individual rights, "states' rights" under federalism, and opposition to international interventionism and unnecessary wars, I was unable to find a single principle that I had forsaken or modified during my travels from the "far right" days to my current status as a political "moderate."

Yet even on conspiracy theories, my fellow John Birchers and I are now middle-of-the roaders. In the 1960s, the mass media called John Birchers like me "nutty conspiracy theorists," while the National Review was lauded by the Establishment as a "responsible" conservative journal. I never agreed with that assessment, but it is beyond question that National Review and its founder William E Buckley have today become the nutty conspiracy theorists that the John Birch Society never was. The JBS does identify and expose conspiracy, of course. But it exposes real conspiracies: it does not peddle as fact unproven or false conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said about National Review. For example, after the president's June 28 address to the nation on the Iraq War, National Review published an essay by regular contributor Andrew C. McCarthy that claimed that before the Iraq War "Saddam's intelligence service aided and abetted al Qaeda terrorists planning operations," despite the fact that the CIA and every U.S. intelligence agency have always said the opposite. But McCarthy nevertheless blamed Hussein for assisting al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks, citing as his best evidence the allegation that Iraqi intelligence operative Ahmed Hikmat Shakir had "facilitated a 9/11 hijacker into Malaysia and was in attendance at ...