Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley Jr., recently endorsed Obama and for that he was forced to leave the magazine his father founded.

Some choice segments in his own words:
As for the mail flooding into National Review Online—that’s been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.
<..>
Kathleen [Parker] had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster.
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I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.
<..>
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.
Glad to see the right wing is imploding from the inside, one by one eating their own. And it's not as if it's one crazed faction warring against another, but rather some within the "big tent" simply see Obama as the better candidate and yet to voice this belief publicly, offering reasons, is apparently an unforgivable sin worthy of banishment.

To those of us on the outside, the question remains: who would ever want to be a part of this group to begin with? Their true colors are evident with these types of episodes as well as on the McCain campaign trail.

Expect more of the same in the next few weeks, and if Obama wins, the next several years.

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