"Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship."

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama - The Daily Beast

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

In reaction to this, readers of the National Review demanded Buckley's head; proving once and for all that irony, historicity and a decent regard for those who have legitimately worked to earn the status of "arrogant elitist bastard" have long vanished from the Republican Party.

Christopher did the proper thing; offering his resignation in a gesture that, under such circumstances, is properly taken as both noble and properly symbolic. It was accepted by the editor with what one might refer to as "unseemly haste."

(As former editor of several minor print publications, I learned that columnists that could provoke such visceral outrage were pearls beyond price. This is an editorial decision that will go down in history as being akin to trading Gretzky to the LA Kings.)

In a subsequent article for what appears to be his new online digs, Buckley is much kinder than I would be to his former fellows:

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.

I can argue with only one thing in the statement above; the assertion that Reagan was a "Real Conservative." Indeed, I consider him to be the beginning of the end for real conservatism in US politics; a man adept at supplying simple answers suited for simple minds.

Sarah Palin is the final insult to those of us who consider ourselves conservative in the proper sense; a sense that can be summed up in that fine old Midwestern phrase; "Don't piss on my boots and tell me it's raining."

It's been "raining" since 1980 in America. I mean that in an hemispheric sense; it's time for real conservatives of all nations and languages of Columbia to hoist the black umbrella, shielding all below from the "trickle down" twaddle of Voodoo Viziers of the Reganite Rabble. For the fruits of a thing one pays for by taxes - government - should go to those who pay, rather than those who use it steal from and abuse those who have paid and will have to pay even more in the future.

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