Wow. Conservative bloggers certainly can be harsh, but their harshness is usually reserved for Democrats and "liberals," not for their own Fearless Leader. But, apparently, the situation in Iraq has started to send conservatives over the edge, as this post by Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society member, Professor Stephen Bainbridge,, demonstrates:
It's time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my nearly 5 decades, but what have we really accomplished? Is government smaller? Have we hacked away at the nanny state? Are the unborn any more protected? Have we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority?[...]
While we remain bogged down in Iraq, of course, Osama bin Laden remains at large somewhere. Multi-tasking is all the rage these days, but whatever happened to finishing a job you started? It strikes me that catching Osama would have done a lot more to discourage the jihadists than anything we've done in Iraq.
What really annoys me, however, are the domestic implications of all this. The conservative agenda has advanced hardly at all since the Iraq War began. Worse yet, the growing unpopularity of the war threatens to undo all the electoral gains we conservatives have achieved in this decade. Stalwarts like me are not going to vote for Birkenstock wearers no matter how bad things get in Iraq, but what about the proverbial soccer moms? Gerrymandering probably will save the House for us at least through the 2010 redistricting, but what about the Senate and the White House?
In sum, I am not a happy camper. I'm very afraid that 100 years from now historians will look back at W's term and ask "what might have been?"
Ouch!
Meanwhile, the "Rightwing Nuthouse" (love the name, by the way!) piles on:
The summer seems to have turned into a season of discontent for conservatives. As the President?s popularity plummets and support for the War in Iraq wavers, Administration policies that perhaps should have been questioned long ago but for the intervention of politics and the November election have come under attack.[...]
Far from being the monolithic entity we are accused of by our critics on the left, the center-right Shadow Media has been roiled in recent months by several high energy, high profile issues, revealing cracks and splits between religious conservatives, secular conservatives, neo-conservatives, and libertarians. The Terri Schiavo imbroglio was instructive in this regard in that it exacerbated tensions that already existed between the religious conservatives and libertarians while revealing the true fault lines in the conservative movement that exist between rationalists and theists.
But where these fault lines seemed to knit together and ultimately unite conservatives was at the water?s edge. Schiavo, intelligent design, the courts ? all the issues that divided us were put aside once the debate turned to the War on Terror. The overarching need to support the President as Commander in Chief and our troops in the field against the hard left whose policy prescriptions would eventually lead, I believe, to an unthinkable terrorist attack on the homeland outweighed any quibbles we may have had with the Administration?s tactical and strategic thinking.
Sadly, this has now changed.
And on and on it goes. You know things are bad in Bush Amerika when even conservatives start losing it. Now, we just have to wait for Virginia Republicans to wake up from their summer doldrums and realize: Jerry Kilgore is our version of George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist all rolled into one, but with an even slimmer record of accomplishment (if that's possible) than those guys.
That's why, for Virginia Republicans, the choice this November is clear: if you can't stomach voting for a moderate, Mark Warner Democrat like Tim Kaine, then don't. Vote for a REAL Republican -- an "independent" Republican named Russ Potts. Or, watch Jerry Kilgore "piss away" our state's prosperity, AAA bond rating, budget surplus, and the conservative movement in Virginia as well. It's your choice!