wither in the light

Pat Buchanan's 'The American Conservative' magazine is endorsing Kerry, even if it is just so the conservatives can regain control of their party four years later - if Kerry 'wins', he'll be lucky if he can even get a good start on cleaning up the mess Bush has made, and I think the conservatives are correct in their prediction that four years after Kerry we'll have a conservative president. (Another four years of Bush and we'll be a pile of smoking rubble by then, so even the conservatives are realizing they need to get someone else in there.) There's no way for Kerry to come through this clean and on top. I don't know why he even wants the job, but I'm glad he's stepping up to the plate and taking a hit for the country.

The editorial has a lot of insightful commentary, regardless of your 'side':

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... it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy.

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.

George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism.

The people who, four years ago, I thought were the wackiest and most dangerous nutjobs in the country sound like the very voice of reason compared to the Bush administration. Buchanan says vote for Kerry. Hunter Thompson is wishing Nixon was back. The lion and the lamb are engaged in some sort of clusterfuck... it's too bad that this seeming unity is really just the conservatives asking for a four-year reprieve so they can regroup, but hey, whatever gets Cowboy Fucktard out of the White House is fine by me.

[via SixDifferentWays]