restless reformer

Rush and other pundits kept saying that this upcoming election was not going to be about the Iraq war. They’re wrong. And they’re especially wrong if it’s McCain vs. Obama. Sullivan makes the point well today. McCain doesn’t want to talk about the wisdom of going into Iraq in the first place. Hillary will go along with that just fine. Obama won’t. I keep trying to find a silver lining about this upcoming election, and one of them is definitely this: McCain vs. Obama will make us revisit the notion of pre-emptive war, which is a good thing.

Oh, and here’s Buckley on Bush:

Bill Buckley had come to recognize the degraded state of American conservatism. In 2006, he deplored Bush’s “absence of effective conservative ideology - with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending.” And he noted the failure of Bush’s expansive, interventionist foreign policy.

“If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign,” Buckley told CBS News. No “successor would reenunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious.”