To be a respectable conservative, you turn in your memory at the gate. So everybody is saying that the love for McCain in the national media is something new. The press is more enthusiastic about McCain than they are about liberal Democrats. For the liberal press to be more in love with a Republican than with liberal Democrats is supposed to be something new.

It isn't. It is just that, since Reagan, Republicans have not had a person the media COULD love the way they love McCain. But McCain offers the press something that no liberal Democrat can offer them: control of the OPPOSITION. I was in the political arena back when the press had liberal Republicans to do their fighting for them. I remember when the press loved the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller more than they did any liberal Democrat except Kennedy, and that was only because Kennedy was the President of the United States while Rockefeller was only the governor of New York.

In 1961, the press position was represented by a columnist who said, "Rockefeller stands as much chance of losing the 1964 Republican nomination as he does of going broke." Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and other liberal Republicans had a press every bit as good as that for McCain today.

The reason for this wild popularity of yesterday's liberal Republicans and today's McCain is that one John McCain or one liberal Republican is worth several times as much to liberals as an outright liberal Democrat is. Liberals want to cut off corporate contributions and leave unions free to use their members' dues to back liberals. They want the media to have more influence and grassroots money to have less. That is what the McCain -Feingold proposal does.

But the simple fact is that McCain-Feingold can spare Feingold. There are dozens of other liberal Democrats ready to sponsor this bill to favor liberal Democrats. But McCain-Feingold would be lost without a McCain to push it.

Even more important, the anti-nationalist foreign policy of using troops and bombs to enforce multiculturalism abroad is opposed by conservatives. Without McCain, it would be a purely liberal policy. But McCain makes it bipartisan. If they could nominate McCain, there would be no major opposition to anything liberals choose to do abroad.

If McCain can get some Americans killed in Europe in the name of multiculturalism, most conservatives will jump on board. To most conservatives, any cause in which American soldiers get killed becomes a holy cause. Conservatives make no distinction between the heroism of American troops and the policies they are sent to enforce. If liberals get Americans killed for their policies, conservatives will declare those liberal policies to be holy.

In Vietnam, conservatives started out saying that we should either fight to win or get out. At first, conservatives said that Americans troops were not just tokens to be spent in a hopeless, no-win war.

But by the end of that war, conservatives were blindly backing the endless bloodbath in Indo-China.

Conservatives have no memory, but liberals remember all of that. That is why the media is crazy about McCain, and why they were just as crazy about Nelson Rockefeller.

You and I are paying for Federal grants to the Northeast to pay for their heating oil this cold winter.

New Englanders are complaining about the high price of their heating oil. Since respectable conservatives have no memory, it is up to me to remind you of why that bill is so high. There is no reason for New England to be using heating oil to warm their houses. That raises the price of oil for all of us.

It is absurd for this scarce resource to be used for heating houses. Atomic power should be doing it.

All or nearly all of the electric power of France comes from safe, clean nuclear power. Oil is for automobiles

But we are speaking here of leftist New England, where the Jane Fondistas will not tolerate nuclear power. No one ever died as a result of radiation from a nuclear power plant in the Western world, and Europe has a perfect track record using it. But the leftists managed to keep it almost entirely out of the Northeast by their attacks on Seabrook.

The leftist argument is that, while no one has died from nuclear power in the West, there COULD be some risk. By contrast, they say, no one dies producing the good old, "safe" sources of power like coal and oil. That is, no one who matters.

As I pointed out on November 6 in "Leftist 'Champions of the Working Class' Never See Working People", an old rightist like me knows lots of oil rig workers and coal miners who can tell you about many, many people who died producing the "safe" forms of energy. But leftists never meet real working people, so the dangers of other forms of energy, as opposed to nuclear power, are unknown to them.

Back when the anti-nuclear movement was at its peak, New England had a cheap source of oil. The government required Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma to provide oil at lower-than-market prices under price controls. So New Englanders preferred to use artificially cheap Southern oil and follow fashion by being anti-nuclear.

It is important to remember that those oil price controls were another triumph of Our Glorious Union. When New England controlled most of the industry in America, Southerners were required to pay a lot more for those products because of government tariffs, which artificially raised the price of New England industrial goods. When the South became the main source of oil, the government acted to be sure that the East got Southern oil cheaply at the South's expense.

The South is still suffering from the decades in which New England railway owners charged several times as much to send industrial products north as sending them south. This internal, private tariff kept industry out of the South for generations. The New Deal began the process of ending it, but this process was not complete until after the New Deal (and World War II) ended.

As I said, no respectable conservative has any memory of any long-term liberal policy disaster. So no one but me is going to remind you that New England's successful war against nuclear energy is the reason their fuel costs are so high this winter. OPEC has raised the price of oil, and since the Reagan Administration got rid of price controls on oil, New England cannot simply stick its fangs back in the South's throat to get cheap oil.

So New England uses our tax money to burn scarce oil to heat its houses. It is important to remember that their trendy victories over nuclear power costs you and me money each time we go to the oil pump.