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Palin Works For McCain

At TalkLeft, there is a post criticizing the TAC editors’ open letter to Palin: The American Conservative sees in Palin what it once saw in George Bush: a regular person with strong traditional values who champions faith, limited government, and pro-life judges. Let’s get something straight.  I am fairly confident when I say that TAC never saw much […]

At TalkLeft, there is a post criticizing the TAC editors’ open letter to Palin:

The American Conservative sees in Palin what it once saw in George Bush: a regular person with strong traditional values who champions faith, limited government, and pro-life judges.

Let’s get something straight.  I am fairly confident when I say that TAC never saw much of anything in George Bush, since the magazine was founded in part to oppose the major initiatives of his Presidency, including war in the Near East generally and in Iraq specifically, and most of us certainly did not think that Bush had any interest in limited government.  It is true that Mr. Buchanan endorsed him in 2004, stressing mainly the issue of judges, but that was a fairly unpopular view with most of the readership and was not shared by any of the other editors.  It’s not really true that TAC “felt betrayed” that Bush allowed a “values agenda” to be hijacked by interventionist foreign policy, since by the time the magazine started that betrayal of the people who voted for him was already complete or was in the process of being done. 

However the TalkLeft blogger gets this much right:

The president was never committed to the right’s values agenda or to a conservative belief in responsible spending and limited presidential power.

Then again, I think pretty much everyone who has worked for TAC or read it on a regular basis already knew that and knew it long before anyone else.  Still, it’s refreshing to find someone from the left who understands that Bush is not an ultra-conservative or really much of a conservative of any kind, as it sometimes flatters liberals to believe.  I also can’t really disagree when this TChris says:

Palin’s heart may be full of faith, but her understanding of foreign policy is clearly nonexistent. She will embrace McCain’s positions with loyalty and relief, to the extent that she can understand and remember them.

This is essentially what I have been saying for a month now. 

While I can’t speak for the editors, the way I read the open letter is as a vehicle to offer a comprehensive critique of the failures of the Bush administration and neoconservatism.  As an indictment of the fanaticism and failure of Mr. Bush and his advisors, it is outstanding and required reading.  It is my guess that the “open letter” format is simply a way to relate the magazine’s main themes to a figure who is much in the news right now.

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