10/14/08: The Right Wing Turns its Guns on - Itself!

Poor Christopher Buckley. The son of the famed hero of conservatives and founder of the National Review, Willam F. Buckley, was fired from the magazine his father founded.
What was his egregious crime?
Why, last week in his column at the Daily Beast, he said, reluctantly, that he could not see voting for the McCain/Palin ticket, and would be voting for Obama/Biden. That did it - the righteous fires were unleashed on his head.

Hell hath no fury like a wingnut scorned.

I wrote previously that Kathleen Parker of the National Review was one of many who felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. Buckley says "This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster."
As for him, National Review Online mail has "been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless."

Well, C. Buckley is not sorry. Not about his voting preference, that is. But he IS sorry that it's come to this for the modern conservative movement. He says in his column today sorry-dad-i-was-fired:

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.

But other people ARE leaving the Republican Party. At the polls, in big numbers. Pollster.com this morning released several surveys that showed Obama increased his lead in 4 battleground states: Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. But here's the kicker: today on the Pollster map, Florida turned SOLID BLUE!!