Snip:
GO, PAT GO. Tim Noah wants to "fan the flames" of rumors that Alabama judge Roy Moore might launch a third-party bid for the presidency attacking Bush from the right. It's an interesting idea, but I think a better candidate might well be Pat Buchanan. His 2000 Reform Party campaign to revive the isolationist and protectionist elements of the American right fizzled because at the time it was lacking in a serious rationale. Events since 9-11, however, have proven that in an important sense Pat was right and this is not your grandfather's Republican Party. Check out his cover story in the latest issue of The American Conservative, ostensible a review of An End to Evil but in fact a long screed against neoconservative foreign policy in general. It ends saying:
The Perle-Frum book is marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons' fatal flaw. In the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing their plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to deny it. They reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where they came from, what they believed, how they were different, and how they had become the new elite. With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush marching to their war drums, one of them bellowed, "We are all neoconservatives now!"
But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country ensnared in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will be made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
For a long time now Buchanan's basic conceit has been that the president is a good guy being tragically mislead by some of his advisors. This notion, however comforting, is pretty clearly untenable. After all, it isn't just the Iraq War that Buchanan dislikes. By his magazine's lights, the president's new immigration initiative is far too generous, Bush's spending habits are out of control, and his trade policies are all wrong as well. At a certain point you need to recognize that your beef is with the president, not his advisors.
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/