Procrastinet

American Conservative's Kerry Endorsement

filed under: Idle Chatter

For this election, the editors of American Conservative Magazine decided they couldn't come out and endorse one candidate - so they assigned different editors to write individual endorsements of their chosen guy.

Excerpts from Scott McConnell's endorsement of Kerry:

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal—Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it—and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

And:

If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past—and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.

If you read the rest of the article, you'll get a sense for the thinking of what Brad DeLong calls "grown up Republicans." It's fascinating. If anything, McConnell is more freaked out by Bush than most Lefties I know.

Side note: the Neocons and their defenders have long claimed that any criticism of Neoconservatism is actually thinly veiled anti-Semitism. This is because many prominent Neoconservatives are Jewish and of a hawkish, Zionist bent. How criticising the far right political views of a particular slice of the Jewish community is supposed to render one anti-Semitic, I have no idea.

However, the paragraphs in McConnell's endorsement (or more accurately, anti-endorsement) that deal with the Neocons who are making Bush Admin foreign policy skate right up to and at times over that line. He makes it clear that he is railing against extremism of the Jewish and Christian flavor, but language like "Israel-obsessed intellectuals" has the unmistakably sneering tone of classic anti-Semitism. Fairly chilling stuff. This is one pissed off conservative.

[Hat tip: Mark S.]

Posted by rjt at October 22, 2004 04:02 PM