Friday, December 3, 2004

Archive: American Conservative endorses Kerry

October 22, 2004

Several friends forwarded this item to me:

FOCUS: The American Conservative Kerry's the One

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. 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. His immigration policies - temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election - are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush
would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support. [ . . . ]
Yeah, pretty amazing. The humor of a conservative hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Kerry statement is not lost on me.

Of course, what's missing is as telling as what's present: No mention of Bush's dreadful effects on civil liberties, little mention of his destruction of the economy for generations to come, no mention of the environment. Just Iraq, immigrants, and Israel.

Yeah, okay--whatever it takes. Sign here, and when we all wake up Wednesday morning November 3rd, we can each discover that the other disappeared but left us with cab fare home.

No comments: