Kerry Endorsement, The American Conservative

George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky's concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans won't do. This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.

The American Conservative has endorsed John Kerry by dis-endorsing George W. Bush. Rather than a statement telling why John Kerry should be the next president it is a litany of reasons why dubya should not be re-elected.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations.

Bush has made the United States the worlds bully and bad guy.

During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world.
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In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office.

Because of the Bush policies we are alone in a world with more "bad guys".

.....as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge.

Israel, the Christian Right and the neo-cons.

But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term.

A Kerry win will make it possible for "real conservatives" to take back the Republican Party.

A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.