Republicans, again

We were late getting out of the house to church this morning, so I caught a little bit of the GOP debate on "This Week." When I turned it on, McCain was finishing up a noble oration about how as president, he would keep fighting for freedom and democracy around the world. And I thought: Oh yeah, that's why I'm not going to be voting for him in the Texas GOP presidential primary, and why I'm almost certainly not going to vote for the Republican nominee in the general election. If these guys cannot learn from the past five years how catastrophic this worldview is, they would be a menace in office. (More on which in the next entry...).

Correction: this, from the NYT account of the debate, is who I'll probably vote for in the Texas GOP primary:

On Iraq, only one candidate — Representative Ron Paul of Texas — advocated a withdrawal. “We’re losing this one,” he said. “We shouldn’t be there. We ought to just come home.”

Over at Andrew Sullivan's blog, his guest bloggers Stephen Bainbridge and Bruce Bartlett, two of my favorite conservative commentators, have been talking about how the GOP has left them (go here to Andrew's main page, and read the various comments they've posted). Bruce said this morning, "[O]nce upon a time, not too long ago, I would have cared that there was a Republican debate. Now I would just as soon watch an infomercial." Me too -- I only watched a bit of it because I need to keep up with this stuff for the sake of my job. Bruce is an economic conservative, and I'm a religious/social conservative, so I imagine our disappointments differ in the particulars. But we both thought our team was better than it turned out to be in power.

Prof. Bainbridge writes, "I used to be a yellow dog Republican. These days, however, I think of myself as a disgruntled right-of-center independent." Me too -- that, as the professor notes elsewhere, is pretty much where traditional conservatives end up these days, given what the GOP has become. It really is remarkable when you think about it: we conservatives had a Republican president and a Republican Congress, and therefore the opportunity to see a lot of our principles realized as law and public policy. But we blew it.

If only for reasons of competence, I don't blame political independents for switching affection to the Democratic Party, though I won't be joining them. Leaving aside the whole question of abortion, eugenics and the usual "culture of life" issues that prevent theocons from voting Democratic, I am not in the least bit convinced that the Democrats are sufficiently different from the Republicans on foreign policy. They'd be better about Iraq, to be sure, but on public radio the other day, I heard Joe Biden bloviating about the US need to intervene militarily overseas for moral reasons. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been signaling of late their own imprudence in foreign affairs, with regard to a willingness to intervene abroad. To be clear, I don't believe military intervention should be off the table as a matter of principle, but I am not persuaded in the slightest that the Democrats have learned the lesson of Iraq. To the contrary, the more I see of them, the more I am starting to think that what they really believe is that they would do intervention more intelligently.

So, what are you doing for election day? All disaffected rightist independents should show up at Prof. Bainbridge's house to get sloshed. I'll make the gumbo.