Boy, the liberventionists sure picked a great time to become conservatives. Howard Fineman at MSNBC says the “conservative coalition” has had it. Wouldn’t that be great? The oddball grouping of fundamentalist crazies, the warfare mercantilists, fiscal conservatives and libertarians was in jeopardy after the fall of Communism when quite a few on the right who had believed William F. Buckley, when he said that the “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” was strictly a temporary measure found themselves disappointed.
The imperial rule of Bill “burn and machine gun and call it suicide” Clinton helped keep the structure of the right intact temporarily, but the damage had already been done. George W. Bush and his neoconservative cronies’ “strategic disaster” of a war in Iraq, as former Reagan-era NSA director William Odom has called it, has finished the job.
The neocons, having created the war in Iraq, have now turned on Bush for having it waged, and officially abandoned him:
“Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.
The flight of the neocons – just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about – is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.”
Fineman is adding the neocons to the religious crazies who are mad about Harriet Myers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, businessmen (presumably from companies other than Halliburton) who are embarrassed by the disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, fiscal conservatives worried about funny money, and those he calls “isolationists” (the old smear term against those who advocate political “independence“).
Traditional establishment chessboard types like Zbigniew Brzezinski haven’t liked him since he went to Iraq instead of taking over all of Central Asia.
So who are the 40% of people left supporting George W. Bush and the stupidest foreign policy since McKinley waged aggressive war in the Philippines to Christianize the Catholics?
This seems like a pretty good sample: American government school graduates who think Iran is a continent in the South Pacific.