The Dish

A conservative Kansas newspaper, The Johnson County Sun, prepares its readers for impending endorsements of Democrats. The paper has long been reliably Republican, as has its chairman. But no longer. Money quote:

If I was a closet Democrat, I must have hidden it well, especially from myself, since I always beat up on Democrats in my columns. I have called them leftists, socialists, and every other name in the book, because I thought they were flat-out wrong.

And, for the most part, I still do. I am opposed to big government. I have little use for unions. I never liked the welfare plans. I am opposed to weak-kneed defense policies. I have always been for fiscal prudence. I think back to the policies of most Democrats, and I cringe.

So, what in the world has happened?

The Republican Party has changed, and it has changed monumentally.

You almost cannot be a victorious traditional Republican candidate with mainstream values in Johnson County or in Kansas anymore, because these candidates never get on the ballot in the general election. They lose in low turnout primaries, where the far right shows up to vote in disproportionate numbers.

To win a Republican primary, the candidate must move to the right.

What does to-the-right mean?

It means anti-public education, though claiming to support it.

It means weak support of our universities, while praising them.

It means anti-stem cell research.

It means ridiculing global warming.

It means gay bashing. Not so much gay marriage, but just bashing gays.

It means immigrant bashing. I’m talking about the viciousness.

It means putting religion in public schools. Not just prayer.

It means mocking evolution and claiming it is not science.

It means denigrating even abstinence-based sex education.

Note, I did not say it means "anti-abortion," because I do not find that position repugnant, at all. I respect that position.

But everything else adds up to priorities that have nothing to do with the Republican Party I once knew.

That’s why, in the absence of so-called traditional Republican candidates, the choice comes down to right-wing Republicans or conservative Democrats.

And now you know why we have been forced to move left.

I know exactly how he feels. And if this recognition is going on in a small paper in Kansas, then there’s hope for conservatism yet.

Last night’s sit-down about "The Conservative Soul" can be viewed online here, with a transcript. Thanks for the scores of emails about it. Salon’s interview can be read here. You can buy the book online here. The Amazon reader reviews so far are encouraging.

The candidate for the 3rd district in Nebraska is not just easy on the eyes. He has also won the endorsement of the Omaha World-Herald. Money quote:

No, Kleeb has not voiced the degree of skepticism and sometimes even outright hostility toward government advanced by Smith. But Kleeb is hardly a Ted Kennedy clone – consider, for example, Kleeb’s repeated, sensible expressions of skepticism toward the regulatory excesses of the Endangered Species Act. Kleeb, who describes himself as a devoted Catholic, also generally adheres to conservative positions on social issues that have resonated with many 3rd District voters over the years.

Indeed, Kleeb’s actions and statements during this campaign should provide a lesson to the left-leaning activists who hold such sway in his state party. If they would genuinely listen to Kleeb (as opposed to opportunistically hoping that he’ll merely gain them a political office), they could learn a thing or two about how a Nebraska Democrat can impressively look to this state’s political center rather than clinging feverishly to impractical liberal rhetoric and policy stances.

There’s no denying it now. And al Qaeda has declared its own Islamic republic in the West of the anarchic country. The Zarqawi strategy of fomenting sectarian war and carving out a terror enclave has survived his death. The question we now face is whether to accept this fait accompli and withdraw, or construct a radically new strategy with many more troops to try again.

An all-but racist ad on immigration from the Republicans. Notice the visual contrast between the alleged illegals and the white family who will have to "foot the bill" for them. Lovely. But effective.

That’s where the evidence is obviously pointing. There clearly was a meeting between Kirk Fordham and Hastert’s close aide, Scott Palmer, to discuss the Foley predations. There is now more than one piece of testimony backing that up; and the idea that Scott Palmer would never have told Hastert about this potentially explosive issue is preposterous. So Hastert knew he had a serious problem with Foley for a long time – many on the Hill say years – and did nothing about it. When Foley wanted to retire before this election, he was talked out of it by Karl Rove. What did Rove know? Does anyone doubt that a man as politically attuned as Rove had no clue about the liabilities in Foley’s past? My view is that Hastert will be forced to step down if the investigation concludes before November 7. So Larry Kudlow has a point. If Hastert wants to minimize the damage, he should quit now, rather than a week before the election.

Norm Geras, who, like me, despised the Saddam regime and feels no need to apologize for wanting it removed, is nonetheless forced to a brutal provisional conclusion: this war has failed. That does not mean that we should pull out (allthough some may reasonably infer that). It does mean that the reasons many of us backed this war have been utterly undermined in the last three years:

Had I been able to foresee, in January and February 2003, that the war would have the results it has actually had in the numbers of Iraqis killed and the numbers now daily dying, with the country (more than three years down the line) on the very threshold of civil war if not already across that threshold, I would not have felt able to support the war and I would not have supported it.

Measured, in other words, against the hopes of what it might lead to and the likelihoods as I assessed them, the war has failed. Had I foreseen a failure of this magnitude, I would have withheld my support. Even then, I would not have been able to bring myself to oppose the war. As I have said two or three times before, nothing on earth could have induced me to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime. But I would have stood aside.

That’s where I am too. Before the war, I argued for it along just war grounds: that the risk of inaction was greater than action, that the continuance of sanctions was an immoral burden on the Iraqi people, that we would conduct the war aiming to minimize casualties, and would assume responsibility for the security situation as soon as we toppled Saddam. But we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that the risks of inaction were far less than we were told; we know, after Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bagram and all the other torture sites, that in the conduct of the war, the Bush administration has wrecked America’s moral high ground; we know that our refusal to provide security for Iraqis has led to the deaths of more innocents than even under Saddam. We may not be the ones killing civilians. But we are responsible for the situation in which such killings can occur with impunity. Those of us who supported this war cannot wash our hands of the blood of tens of thousands of innocents it has now claimed. Our intentions may have been good. But we misjudged this administration. And we misjudged the extent of the collapse of Iraqi civil society in the 1990s.

That changes the moral equation. I stand by my good-faith belief that ridding the world of Saddam’s tyranny was a great and important thing. I even stand by my naive but sincere faith in the Bush administration in 2002. But I was wrong, as events have proven. And the human carnage in Iraq today, taking place because the U.S. refused to provide order after the invasion, renders the justice of the war deeply compromised. A war that was not, it turns out, the last resort; a war that has authorized torture; a war that has led to a civilian casualty rate of around 7,000 a month; a war that has unleashed far more terrorism than it has stifled: whatever else this is, it is not the just war some of us once supported. It is in another category now.

That does not mean our moral responsibility is to abandon Iraq even further. It may require the opposite. But it does mean that we have witnessed a moral failure on an epic scale. I cannot see how voters with consciences can reward those who let it happen.

Colbert et Moi:

San Francisco, California, 8 am.

Glenn Reynolds provides his analysis of why the GOP may lose many seats next month. All his points are fair ones, but they miss what are for me the big issues. Two words: Iraq and spending. Three years after the invasion of Iraq, we have a problem. Instead of a stabilizing society with new freedoms, we have record levels of suicide attacks, tens of thousands of civilian casualties (with records being broken each month), rampant torture and death squads, and political paralysis (I’m hearing rumors of a coup brewing in Baghdad). We also failed to find any of the WMDs the war was based on. All this means – and I’m sorry to break this to Instapundit – that someone in the Bush administration screwed up the most important task of our time. Why will the Republicans be defeated this November, if they are? To paraphrase Mr Carville, it’s losing the war, stupid.

People also vote Republican because they want representatives able to say no to government spending. The current Bush GOP says: YES, MORE PLEASE. The two most significant facts about the current crew in power is that they have increased the debt overhang facing the next generation from $20 trillion to $43 trillion in five years. The new Medicare entitlement was putting fiscal gasoline on a raging fire of debt. No one who voted for it can even be faintly described as conservative. Then there’s simple pork and corruption. The last transportation bill had over 6,000 earmarks in it. Reagan vetoed a bill because it had 150 earmarks in it. That was when the GOP was conservative. What Bush-DeLay-Hastert-Frist are about is not fiscal conservatism in any recognizable form. They are about borrowing vast amounts of money from Asian banks, spending more liberally than any Democratic Congress since FDR, and using it to bribe voters in gerry-mandered districts to keep themselves in power.

They have become what they once opposed. Which is why it is time to kick them out.