Even the dimmest eyes are opening ... A right wing flack reneges

Shrillblog quotes Rob Dreher (no permalink, alas). I've never heard of him, he seems like a dim right wing pundit. Things are very bad for Bush, and, alas, for all of us, when someone like him wakes up...

Crunchy Con: My All Things Considered commentary - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and religion blog:


... I talk about coming to terms with the end of an illusion. As someone who came of political age under Reagan, I've been a conservative for most of my life (for the sake of brevity, NPR edited out the part of the essay in which I explained that I'd had a high school and early-college dalliance with liberalism). I disdained the Vietnam-era "hippie" mentality with regard to national security. I took it for granted that those people were hung up on Vietnam, and ought not be listened to because they were blame-America-first liberals....

I formed my political views on national security in the confident glow of Reaganism. For me, it was a fact of life that Republicans were strong, capable and confident, and Democrats were weak, vacillating and incompetent.... When Bush led us into the Iraq War, I thought the liberals who predicted doom -- and, crucially, the conservatives (like Buchanan) who did as well -- were either fools, cowards or unpatriotic. But now I see that I was the fool. In the NPR piece, I wrote about how I sat there watching Bush's speech and thought that when they get old enough to understand these things, I have got to teach my children never, ever to take the word of presidents or generals at face value. To question authority, because the government will send you off to kill and die for noble-sounding rot (e.g., crusading for democracy in the Middle East). And it hit me that this is precisely the message that so many of those who lived through the Vietnam experience tried to tell my generation -- in my case, and in the case of so many other Gen X Reagan Youth, in vain.

I give him credit for speaking up now. It may yet do some good it if turns enough GOP senators to prevent a filibuster of moves to reduce Bush's power.