Hilarious. So Christopher Buckley, whose father William F. Buckley founded the National Review, that bastion of conservatism, recently had the nerve - the nerve! - to endorse Obama.
Which, as any right-winger who actually opens his eyes and sees a reality that differs from the conservative line knows, will bring you boatloads of vitriolic hate mail from the True Believers who now see you an apostate.
Conservatism isn’t a political inclination. It’s a religious faith.
Buckley was writing a column for the National Review, but no more; the hate mail was so overwhelming that he offered to resign, an offer that was rapidly accepted.
But, via Sullivan, today we see that Buckley is getting in a final word on the whole affair:
As for the mail flooding into National Review Online—that’s 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….
<snip>
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.
The yurt gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And that’s exactly what conservatives want.
Good.
