Consevatives on Bush! The American Conservative magazine, edited by Pat Buchanan (along with Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell), instead of making a traditional endorsement, states:
"Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership.
In an effort to deepen our readers’ and our own understanding of the options before us, we’ve asked several of our editors and contributors to make “the conservative case” for their favored candidate. Their pieces, plus Taki’s
column closing out this issue, constitute TAC’s endorsement. —The Editors"
amconmag.com
Then they present a list of 7 editorials:
--Buchanan reluctantly supports Bush
--Scott McConnell reluctantly supports Kerry
--Justin Raimondo will vote for Nader
--Howard Phillips and Taki Theodoracopulos pick Michael Peroutka
(Constitution Party)
--Alan W. Bock suggests Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik --Kara
Hopkins isn't going to vote
The problem for political conservatives this election year is that Bush is not one of them. Bush is socially conservative, but not politically conservative. Bush's government is as big and interventionist as any "liberal" government (the type of government intervention may differ, but not the practice of big government in general).
Pat Buchanan - in his editorial "endorsing" Bush - actually says:
"Such a war, we warned, on a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not want war with us, and had no role in 9/11, would be “a tragedy and a disaster.” Invade and we inherit our own West Bank of 23 million Iraqis, unite Islam against us, and incite imams from Morocco to
Malaysia to preach jihad against America...
"...we warned President Bush that he was “being lured into a trap baited for him by neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations...”
"Everything we predicted has come to pass. Iraq is the worst strategic blunder in our lifetime. And for it, George W. Bush, his War Cabinet, and the neoconservatives who plotted and planned this war for a decade bear full
responsibility...
"Mr. Bush was led up the garden path. And the returns from his mid-life conversion to neoconservatism are now in:
"• A guerrilla war in Iraq is dividing and bleeding America with no end in sight. It carries the potential for chaos, civil war, and the dissolution of
that country.
"• Balkanization of America and the looming bankruptcy of California as poverty and crime rates soar from an annual invasion of indigent illegals is forcing native-born Californians to flee the state for the first time since
gold was found at Sutter’s Mill.
"• A fiscal deficit of 4 percent of GDP and merchandise trade deficit of 6 percent of GDP have produced a falling dollar, the highest level of foreign indebtedness in U.S. history, and the loss of one of every six manufacturing
jobs since Bush took office....."
==============
Scott McConnell, who "endorses" Kerry, isn't happy about Kerry:
"If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward."
O'Connell's vote for Kerry is based on O'Connell's opposition to Bush's policies:
"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.
"During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world...
"Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the
analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not something that “good” countries do. It is the main reason that people all
over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security.
"These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of
Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces.
The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists—indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s most hated
country is not an obvious way to secure that help...
"George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be
liberated by American armies—a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft...This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support." |
