Charles, I would guess that the vast majority of the so-called center-right would agree with most of your tenets.

Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny is my personal blueprint of “conservatism”. It steps through thousands of years of human experimentation with different forms of government and arrives at one inescapable conclusion:

While imperfect, the U.S. Constitution is the best form of government ever conceived. It protected the rights of the individual and limited the powers of the federal government. Over time (New Deal, Great Society, etc.), the firewalls of the Constitution were erased by activist judges, leaving us with the strange form of government we have today.

I can’t remember if it even mentions pro-choice/pro-life — that’s a state’s right issue (10th Amendment). The chapter on “Faith and the Founding” explains the intertwined relationship between Judeo-Christian beliefs and the government.

As for Buchanan, etc., I have nothing but disgust for that crew.

On Palin, I’ve never heard anything credible that would lead me to dismiss her as a conservative leader.

On global warming, I believe it’s largely a financial scam. In 1987 I wrote about the World Rainforest Movement’s identification of the IPCC as a bunch of businessmen (see Pedro Moura-Costa) who were out to enrich themselves — and succeeded. Even the WRM (hardly a right-wing group) said the IPCC report was a “fraud”. Until we use open source science, open algorithms, open data, I find it difficult to believe the the U.S. has any impact on climate change. Visiting China puts our country into perspective.