How can the son of William Buckley not know the difference between conservatives and the Republican party? He conflates the GOP and the conservative movement, and then claims that the Republican Party left him. This, while he supports the most far left person in the Senate – and that includes Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, whose voting record is to the right of Barack Obama’s.
The GOP left ME, a believer in small government, secure borders, judges who do not create law, supply-side economics, the Laffer curve, pro-life views and personal freedom. Not Christopher Buckley, who apparently believes something as nebulous as “temperament” qualifies a person to run the most powerful country in the world. I agree with Reagan that “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help,” are some extremely frightening words, as is Biden’s view that paying more taxes is patriotic and Obama’s view that “spread[ing] the wealth [is] good for everybody.” The views I hold are why I left the Republican party, even though I will still vote for McCain as the lesser of two evils.
Buckley is now whinging that he’s been “fatwahed” – reminiscent of liberal populist Mike Huckabee’s “Shiite Republican” cracks – and misrepresenting both the terms of his employment and his departure from National Review. While he is certainly entitled to support Barack Obama, it is simply ridiculous to pretend that doing so is not antithetical to his father’s body of work, antithetical to everything Ronald Reagan believed and worked for, and antithetical to conservativism.
The shock is not that a conservative might vote for a Democrat – I’ve certainly done so, and would have seriously considered voting for Hillary over McCain – but that he’s voting for THIS Democrat, who is literally to the left of the Senate’s only avowed Socialist. He lauds Obama for his intellect and temperament, then expresses a sincere hope that he’s a liar and won’t do everything he’s spent several years promising to do if elected:
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.
If Buckley wants to give Excitable Andy a run for his title as the media’s favorite faux conservative, that’s his business. But it’s not conservative. It’s lunacy.
Added: Ed Morrissey wonders what on earth Buckley is thinking:
In this statement above, Buckley assumes that Obama will take a lesson from his meteoric rise in American politics while building a record as a lockstep liberal ideologue that he should … what? Suddenly decide he can’t succeed as a lockstep liberal ideologue? How exactly would Obama learn that lesson — from the endorsement of Buckley, Douglas Kmiec, and other conservatives who found John McCain’s moderate policy stances so objectionable that they now want to support a liberal?
