HELP! I just found out my friends are republican!

[Atman]

My wife and I just spent a long road-trip with a friend; from the very center of CT, across the rolling hills of PA, right into the heart of Bushland, on the OH/PA border. Bush/Cheney signs were everywhere. Everyone had an American flag on his or her shirt/antenna/bumper/window/donut shop, whatever. Not that American flags are bad things, mind you, but...you know the context here.

Over the course of our trip, I found out that my friend considers himself a "libertarian." Having known him for five years, I am pretty certain he only heard of the term within the last few months, and now only uses it because he's too embarrassed to publicly declare support for Bush.

We've known he has money, but he was never showy about it...only bought a nice fancy imported car last year after driving a Ford shitbox for 180,000 miles. He and his wife lived in an apartment, and only recently bought a house. So, while I suspected that he was probably more on the right side of the fence, our relationship was a weekend drinks-and-dinner type of deal, not super close. This was the first travelling together. I harrassed him about his political affiliation (and wanted to toss him out onto I-80), and suggested that if he is really a libertarian, he should vote Bush out of office.

He said he wasn't going to "throw away his vote" this year by voting for either Bush or Kerry. So again, I said, if you're upset with the way things are going, you MUST vote for John Kerry, because under George Bush, things are going to get much worse.

"Kerry sucks," he said. I agreed. But, I continued, John Kerry still understands the need for environmental laws, blah blah blah.

"Why waste my vote?" He kept reciting it like a talking point, as if it absolved him from any responsibility.

"This year, you will be wasting your vote only if you DON'T vote. A vote for either Kerry OR Bush is monumentally important...NOT voting this year is not an option," I told him.

I explained why this was about so much more than just who runs the White House...I explained the issue almost exclusively on the terms of the SCOTUS, and the Bush family history, how they were not scholars or artists or philanthropists or even real working men...they were just a family of paper-pushing crooks, and that now that they had been exposed (the Bush ties to Saud, the war, etc), there was no way anyone in his right mind could vote to keep him in office. HE AGREED, and repeated that he just wasn't voting. Then he made a Kennedy (JFK) reference. Of course...I'm a liberal, I must worship at the alter of the Kennedy's. I agreed with him that the Kennedy's, and even the Kerry's, were just rich folks working the system, but AGAIN, they are not using their powers for evil. Tereza's foundation doles out billions, the Kennedy's have done more to help real people than a thousand Bush's.

Ugh...Kerry is a jerk. He's monotonous. Blah blah.

I was beginning to understand. In his next attempt to support his position, deflection 2 (at least), he mentioned how if we thought HE was bad, at least he was trying to get his wife to stop watching O'Reilly and Fox. I almost swerved off the road when I heard that. I like(d) the guy's wife! They have money, though. A good deal of it. 35 and 41, no kids. Of course. It all adds up.

He frequently talked down everybody...the Canadians we partied with ("what the fuck good are Canadians? They're nothing without us!"), anyone "not paying their way," the whole gamut. It was a bittersweet trip...we won the tournament we travelled to, but in the twenty hours of driving, I broke through the buffer zone of an informal relationship, and delved into politics, and found out my friends of five years actually kind of disgust me.

Is there any going back? Do I try to sway them, or run like hell? My wife and I really do like them, but Jesus...they're probably voting for Bush. Abby, what do I do?

Troubled In Connecticut