Time for the Republicans to go.......

......and at least some of them agree.
A few weeks ago conservative John Cole of Balloon Juice said he was not going to vote for a Republican in the near future and that they were in need of 40 years in the desert. Well the Washington Monthly asked seven conservatives to explain why they thought the Democrats needed to win control of at least one house of Congress in November. The disgust of George W. Bush was as vehement as anything I have seen from the left. The contributors are listed below and I suggest you check them all out.

• Christopher Buckley


• Bruce Bartlett


• Joe Scarborough


• William A. Niskanen


• Bruce Fein


• Richard A. Viguerie

And in my opinion the best is Idéologie has taken over by Jeffrey Hart, senior editor at National Review, was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

With 9/11, George W. Bush was reborn (again). Until then, his presidency had been undistinguished and his poll numbers low. He had also made one particularly ominous decision. In August 2001, using an executive order, Bush blocked federal support for stem-cell research. In substance that was bad enough—like many people I oppose disease and early death—but equally disturbing was the mindset. Bush summed it up in 2004, when he described stem-cell research as a project “to destroy life to save life.”

Wait a minute. Here Bush was using the same word, “life,” to describe not only a minute clump of cells known as a blastocyst but also an actual human being. In this flagrant disconnect between words and actuality were the early indications of a profoundly ideological mindset.

Religious ideology

Perhaps most damaging to the ideal of conservatism has been the influence of religious ideology. During the fight over whether to remove the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetal state for 15 years, politicians began to say strange and feverish things. “She talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort,” Majority whip Tom DeLay said of a woman for whom cognition of any kind was impossible. (Oxygen deprivation had liquefied her cerebral cortex.) Senate Majority leader Bill Frist examined Schiavo on videotape and deemed her “clearly responsive.” As Schiavo’s case fought its way through the courts, Republicans savaged judges for consistently sanctioning the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube. “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior,” threatened DeLay.

That members of the judiciary were being chastised for responding to the law as written rather than looking, presumably, to some sort of divine guidance was hardly surprising. In 2002, Bush himself had said, “We need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God.” In this chilling use of the word “God,” the president made his views on the rule of law all too clear. The conservative writer Andrew Sullivan has aptly coined the term “Christianism” to refer to this merger of religiosity and politics.

There is much more. Read the rest of this commentary and all of those linked above.