Why I am no longer a conservative

By Heraclitus

No, not me. Lord knows I've dropped enough verbiage on your poor little heads this fine winter's morn. But here's an excellent account by one blogger of how the Iraq War changed the way she thought about contemporary conservatism and today's GOP.

But you know, frankly?--They just used to make Republicans different. There wasn't always this slavish devotion to the Executive branch that there is now. Religious extremists were called, properly, religious extremists, and not "the base." People who boasted of their isolation and ignorance were called idiots, not "true patriots." And so on.

Worth reading, both for the criticism of what passes for conservatism these days, and for the points about the larger problems with our approach to Iraq -- although one notices from reading her post that, while in Vietnam our blindness was national, in Iraq it's been narrowly ideological. Whatever the problems with our involvement in Vietnam, Iraq has been an occupation run by the Heritage Foundation, and you don't get much more irresponsible than that.