Pup would be proud

Remember back when conservatives personified charm, wit, and intelligence? Well, Christopher Buckley recalls those golden days in both his recent essay endorsing Barack Obama for President (see "A first class temperament and a first class intellect"), and now the follow-up recounting his gallant offer ("briskly" accepted) to resign from the National Review, which his father founded.

An excerpt:

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

Read it all at The Daily Beast.



[A yurt, courtesy of Wikipedia]