Lucille
10-25-2008, 10:33 AM
Palintology will dominate the post-mortems (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article5003165.ece)
The ferocity of the current fighting will be nothing though, compared with what comes after the inevitable defeat. John McCain and his campaign will be the initial targets, and will deserve some of the blame they get. How they contrived to turn one of America's most attractive and independent-minded figures into a spluttering partisan and oddly ineffective jackal will be a tale worth hearing. But the retrospective McCain Mutiny will be just the opening salvo in the war for the soul of America's Right. The fighting will be so furious and so multidirectional it will be hard to know what's going on at times.
It will pit neoconservatives against isolationists. The isolationists will say that a crazy ideological faith in America's mission to democratise the world through force of arms led to the debacle in Iraq (even as American arms succeed in democratising Iraq). Do not be surprised if neoconservatives end up feeling closer to an Obama presidency (as they often did to a Clinton presidency) if it seems internationally engaged, than to Republicans who think it's time to pull up the drawbridge.
It will pit social conservatives against libertarians. The latter will argue, with good grounds, that the obsession with creationism and gay marriage ended up leading Ronald Reagan's shining New Jerusalem in an ill-fated and unedifying peasants-with-pitchforks assault on Sodom and Gomorrah.
There will be much fighting around the proposition that conservatives lost their way because they ceased to be conservative. There's always a danger of wilful ideological blindness about this assertion - a favourite reaction to defeat among a party's more extreme members is the claim that it was punishment for not having been extreme enough. But the behaviour of the Bush Administration and its sometime allies in Congress in the past eight years suggests that, in economic terms at least, a bit more traditional conservative distrust of government might not have been a bad thing.
Once again, non-interventionism is confused with "isolationism."
The rest is all about Palin.
Gary Johnson 2012!
The ferocity of the current fighting will be nothing though, compared with what comes after the inevitable defeat. John McCain and his campaign will be the initial targets, and will deserve some of the blame they get. How they contrived to turn one of America's most attractive and independent-minded figures into a spluttering partisan and oddly ineffective jackal will be a tale worth hearing. But the retrospective McCain Mutiny will be just the opening salvo in the war for the soul of America's Right. The fighting will be so furious and so multidirectional it will be hard to know what's going on at times.
It will pit neoconservatives against isolationists. The isolationists will say that a crazy ideological faith in America's mission to democratise the world through force of arms led to the debacle in Iraq (even as American arms succeed in democratising Iraq). Do not be surprised if neoconservatives end up feeling closer to an Obama presidency (as they often did to a Clinton presidency) if it seems internationally engaged, than to Republicans who think it's time to pull up the drawbridge.
It will pit social conservatives against libertarians. The latter will argue, with good grounds, that the obsession with creationism and gay marriage ended up leading Ronald Reagan's shining New Jerusalem in an ill-fated and unedifying peasants-with-pitchforks assault on Sodom and Gomorrah.
There will be much fighting around the proposition that conservatives lost their way because they ceased to be conservative. There's always a danger of wilful ideological blindness about this assertion - a favourite reaction to defeat among a party's more extreme members is the claim that it was punishment for not having been extreme enough. But the behaviour of the Bush Administration and its sometime allies in Congress in the past eight years suggests that, in economic terms at least, a bit more traditional conservative distrust of government might not have been a bad thing.
Once again, non-interventionism is confused with "isolationism."
The rest is all about Palin.
Gary Johnson 2012!