they had everything from libertarnse to neocons to old eisen hour style thinkers like me. but it became a circle your wagons policy and i couldn't go along with a policy i believed to be flawed the brian: sirbling your wagons because of george bush's position on what? you're talking about 43? >> well, after "mission accomplished" it was very hard to argue that things were going well. i didn't feel he was running a conservative foreign policy, which was what the book i wrote, the "ethical realism," was about. it wasn't burkian. it was utopian, robes pierreism, expansionistic. if conservatives think they can't socially engineer america, why in the world would you think you can socially engineer a country you know far less about? brian: how often is it that a think tank is doing what they're doing because of where the money comes from? >> if you get a whole bunch of different donors, you can ignore them. the little ones i think are more amenable to the donors. herityage and the big ones don't. i don't think they do this about money. i think they do this, worse, about convicti