Buckley grazed in strange pastures at times didn’t he? 
I too have been tempted to vote “the worse the better,” actually hoping that Ted Kennedy would gain the White House in 80” just to see the resultant crack-up, and re-emergence of a truly American political culture. Of course I was wrong.  Still, McCain is no Reagan.
If Obama wins and drives the Neocons from power, we will still have the task of ejecting them from the conservative fold. I think it’s key to make any rejection of McCain a matter of rejection of the Neocons, so that his defeat will be theirs. One thing we must learn from them however, we must capture or create institutions of influence representing our cause.  They will have AEI, NR, and the Weekly Standard etc. If we don’t create reputable counter institutions, the Neo’s will be the face of Conservatism to the public in the reaction to Obama’s policies. We can’t let that happen.

Anyone who votes for Obama wishing to rid the lapsed Republic of neo-conservatives should simply watch the recordings of his presentations to AIPAC or his hastily assembled comments upon this Georgian Farrago. The fact that one of his top choices for Veep is Biden who breezily suggested we need to fire off a Billion bucks to the nut job in charge in Georgia should fairly well illustrate that the con of neoconism is everywhere. The Neo-Conservatives assume the shape of those in power and whisper sweet nothings in their ears while passing thick stacks of baksheesh and decrying France between extended stays in their trendily luxe chateaus in Provence.

In other words, the neo-conservatives will not be gone until we decide, once and for all.. that making the majority of our nation’s expenditures on Defense and Security is a one way junket to a poor house named Hell.

“Obamaconservatism”. This is almost as funny as “Compassionate Conservatism”.....one of the bigger thigh slappers out of the twisted mind of the dark comic Karl Rove.

And just in case you still think we need to elect a black President as a form of “white expiation” or “white assurance” ....well, expiate dis :

White Consumerist Juveniles been expiaten in dey rice rockets to cop killer songs by gangstas while talkin they shit fo yeahs and they aint got no bettuh foe it.

Caricature has a way of looking ....well… comical.
When we elect a man or woman of any color because we think they will be the best bet of executing the will of the people in service to the furtherance of individual liberty, we might have “expiated our guilt”. Anything else is posturing and the kind of wishful thinking that has destroyed many an empire in the past. It is using one guilt as cover for obscuring the real guilt we are currently perpetrating. We think we want a blended “melting pot” or patently absurd “color-blind culture when it is the combinations of distinct and relatively intact cultures that makes this country the wonderful thing it is. It should be no surprise that this “information age” is seeing a great leveling process underway that is obliterating cultural distinctions and creating a stew of emptiness...a simulacrum of culture that uses guilt as a fulcrum of imbalance.

Maintaining a sense of guilt for the actions of our ancestors generally gives a free pass to guilt inspiring actions today. We pile them on, arrange them prettily and it makes it seem altogether reasonable that racism will continue till the bitter end.

This has to be one of the more sophist-popular logic things the honorable Mr. Buckley ever wrote… and it is an indication of why he thought David Brooks was a “Conservative thinker” . I’d expect this kind of happy, one size fits all sophistry from the popular musings of Mr. Brooks because this is the kind of populism that has gutted the GOP.

Vote Chuck Baldwin.

Check out Thomas Fleming’s latest anti-Obama essay. The flirtation with Obama by some conservatives completely baffles me. How can a vote for Obama ever be better than a vote for a third party or not voting at all? Heck, I would much rather vote for Nader than Obama.

Well, Nader is far more conservative than Obama and McCain, so I would assume most conservatives would prefer him to either of those two.

I am likely vote for Baldwin, and can’t imagine voting for Obama, but I still don’t understand the argument that John McCain is “less bad” than Obama.  Much of it is predicated on the obviously false assertion that Obama is a black nationalist of some sort, but the accusations of his “leftism” are also baseless.

Obama is the second coming of Adlai Stevenson, not Malcolm X.

I want to see how they justify affirmative action, set asides, and quotas, if this guy is elected President. I am voting for Baldwin but Obama is less evil than McCain.

The purging of “white guilt” and some vague hope for socially transcendent kumbyyah singing are, however, not among them.

Yeah but it’s a variation of worse-is-better.  It moves things along.  The reigning dogma is that inequality is caused by invisible air racism, a post-civil-rights-era form of discrimination that is all-pervasive in society yet detectable only by its results.  If air racism fails to deny the highest office to a person of color, yet his power and good intentions fail to defeat or even do much to mitigate the air racism, we may take an important step closer to the day when people are willing to admit that the problem isn’t the air racism.

White guilt?? The only White guilt I feel is when I think of all those good White rural Christian young men who disproportionately serve on the front lines and are also overrepresented in the war’s casualty rate. Let those swarthy hordes kill each other off. Bring our warriors home.

Here’s another reason to vote for Obama: He’ll probably be America’s Last Black President (think about it—demographics, etc.), so it’s good just to get this awful mess over with.  Thomas Fleming and others are of course right that Obama will make things worse, in the sense of “the worse is the worse.”

I never understood what was supposed to be so great about Buckley, either.  This just confirms it again.

Cap’n Chaos, of course WFB and Ronald Reagan were “race traitors”, given you define one of the very foundations of liberalism - [racial] equality - as “race treason”.

What I am getting at is: RR and WFB were both liberals, ergo it is only natural that they also be “race traitors”, using your terminology.

I find it more important to remind people that WFB and RR were liberals, and to point out, when necessary, that their attitudes towards race, among other issues, were the results of their liberalism.

Captainchaos - I propose that the destruction of your unique genetic make-up would represent a particular loss neither to whites nor to humanity at large. While I can see merit in arguments for the preservation of cultural and ethnic identity in the face of external pressure, the kind of pathetic, pseudo-mystic, “only we”, supremacist claptrap that you spout serves only to nauseate. It is of particular comedic value that this sort of nonsense is usually regurgitated by the type of slavic-latinate mongrels that passes for “white” in America. Most American white supremacists seem to be the sort of obese, ill-educated gutter-dregs that wouldn’t last five minutes in the race war they exhort preparation and agitation for.

With whites becoming a minority by 2042 the white God fearing real Americans might want to consider moving to Argentina. I think there is a Confederate colony down there as well as those for German Jews and Nazis. The nation is described as a country full of Italians that speak Spanish and think they are British. I don’t know if the Eye-ties are considered white though and learning the language of the people that drove you out of the US may be a bit ironic but the scenery is great, they love bar-b-Qing meat, almost no minorities to speak of, and the old architecture is nice. Plus they told the IMF to eff off.

Yeah, I don’t get the whole white guilt thing.  I have (white) ancestral roots in America since 1635, and we never owned any slaves.  They were small farmers in Massachusetts, went to the St. John valley after the Revolution because our ancestor too closely resembled a known local loyalist. 

One of our ancestors fought and died for the Union in the Civil War, so I don’t see why I have to feel guilty over the business practices of a certain subset of white businessmen during the antebellum period in states my ancestors never inhabited.  All these discussions about race, especially ones moderated by foreign born non-whites, or where they are participants, are just a farce.  Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek readily comes to mind. 

Bob Marley and the afrocentrics won’t be criticized for calling Africa the land of blacks, even though historically the civilized portions of it (Egypt and North Africa) are not nor have ever been black.  But such nitpicking is just what one would suspect from some whitey neanderthal like myself, right?

The real disturbing thing is seeing these deculturalized whites discussing the Presidential Race and the predictions that they will become minorities in the countries their ancestors created and not being alarmed one bit.  If white people didn’t go to seed and stopped caring about their own culture and civilization, we (paleos) wouldn’t be on the outside looking in.

Hmm… seeing that Captainchaos’ silliness has been expunged and sanity again prevails, I would suggest that my slightly rabid rebuke be likewise scrubbed.

And Timon - while I see where you’re coming from, I think it would be harsh on the poor Argentines. They’ve been punished enough for grabbing at the Falklands (in what should in future be called a Saakashvili moment of idiocy) and haven’t done much else wrong to the wider world.