Yet more from the Gore speech, on the massive defection taking placer among arc-conservatives who are beginning to notice (or finally speaking up after having enough of it)
An increasing number of Republicans, including veterans of the Reagan White House and even the father of the conservative movement, are now openly expressing dismay over the epic failures of the Bush presidency. Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a veteran of both the Heritage Foundation and the Reagan White House, wrote recently in Salon.com, “Serious conservatives must fear for the country if Bush is re-elected…based on the results of his presidency, a Bush presidency would be catastrophic. Conservatives should choose principles over power.” Bandow seemed most concerned about Bush’s unhealthy habits of mind, saying, “He doesn’t appear to reflect on his actions and seems unable to concede even the slightest mistake. Nor is he willing to hold anyone else responsible for anything. It is a damning combination.” Bandow described Bush’s foreign policy as a “shambles, with Iraq aflame and America increasingly reviled by friend and foe alike.”
The conservative co-host of Crossfire, Tucker Carlson, said about Bush’s Iraq policy, “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it.”
William F. Buckley, Jr., widely acknowledged as the founder of the modern conservative movement in America, wrote of the Iraq war, “If I knew then, what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”
A former Republican Governor of Minnesota, Elmer Andersen, announced in Minneapolis that for the first time in his life he was abandoning the Republican Party in this election because Bush and Cheney “believe their own spin. Both men spew outright untruths with evangelistic fervor.” Andersen attributed his switch to Bush’s “misguided and blatantly false misrepresentations of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The terror seat was Afghanistan. Iraq had no connection to these acts of terror and was not a serious threat to the United States as this President claimed, and there was no relation, it is now obvious, to any serious weaponry.” Governor Andersen was also offended, he said, by “Bush’s phony posturing as cocksure leader of the free world.”
Andersen and many other Republicans are joining with Democrats and millions of Independents this year in proudly supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket.