Monday, October 20, 2008

 

Right on, Chris!

Christopher Buckley, son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, and author of Boomsday, one of the funniest books I read this past year, recently endorsed Barack Obama, engendering a shitstorm of right wing criticism. Since many of our best friends back in Greenville fall into the "fiscally conservative, socially moderate" school of thinking, and have been agonizing over the direction Bush-Cheney have taken their party, today (a day after Colin Powell also broke ranks with the Limbaugh wing of the party and himself endorsed Obama), I thought it appropriate to re-print Buckley's thoughtful response to his critics.

"So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it's a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.


"While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of "conservative" government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.


"So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me."



# posted by goots @ 11:34 AM
Comments:
What Colin Powell and Christopher Buckley say does resonate with many of us. The problem is that FDR's policies made the Depression deeper and longer than it otherwise would have been, and Johnson left us with the malaise of the 1970s. I was at dinner with a CEO of a large public company last night who said Obama, Pelosi, Reid will lead us into a "economic nuclear winter."

Bush and the Republicans in Congress spent money like drunken sailors and yet tried to fight Iraq on the cheap. I can't vote for Obama because taking from the most creative and successful people and "spreading the wealth" is not the path to prosperity. I've never voted for McCain before because he is not competent to deal with the economy.

When I heard "economic nuclear winter" last night, chills went down my spine. It looks like it is inevitable that we are about to find out.
# posted by Blogger Swamp Fox : 4:07 AM
 
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