Seeing as how I didn’t think there was much to Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Obama, I can’t say much for his claim that he had offered a “reasoned argument for the opposition.”  This is not intended to knock Buckley.  As I have said time and again, I don’t think anyone on the right can make a satisfying, reasoned argument for backing Obama except that he isn’t the other guy, which is as true today as it ever was.  You can find legions who can make extremely compelling conservative anti-McCain arguments, but Buckley didn’t much of an anti-McCain case, either.  So this isn’t exactly a classic NR purge, but it seems to me that this would have been one of those moments when NR might have refused his resignation as unnecessary.  At the very least, it might have given that old refrain of “we’re conservatives, not Republicans” a bit more credibility. 

Then again, it’s understandable up to a point.  If you believe, as most NR contributors seem to believe, that Obama is absolutely unacceptable and tied to all sorts of villains, you might find a voting preference for Obama to be equally unacceptable.  One interesting thing that did jump out at me was Buckley’s references to the reader mail he received that talked of his “betrayal” of the conservative movement.  To which he has responded, more or less, “There’s a conservative movement?  Really?  Who are they?”  In his words:

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.  

It is always interesting to me how the people who write these sorts of letters are moved to anger when this or that pundit voices a dissenting view because they are so concerned about treachery, but when the President or other leaders of their preferred party enact plainly anti-conservative policies they are not seen as having betrayed anything.  Even if there is some consistency in the responses, it is almost as if the so-called betrayal of the pundit or writer is considered to be just as bad as that of the politician, when the failures of the latter are usually far more consequential and more deserving of scorn than anything any one writer has to say.  I suppose the point is really this: on the day when Mr. Bush hands in his resignation letter and apologizes for his myriad failures, perhaps then people can talk seriously about Chris Buckley’s “betrayal” of the movement that helped empower Mr. Bush.