Jeffrey Hart

October 28, 2008

In 1968, I was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, then-Governor of California, when he thought he might get the Republican nomination. When Richard Nixon was nominated, I joined the Nixon speechwriter team in New York City. I have been a senior editor at National Review since 1969, but was fired last month.

I support Barack Obama because he is conservative in comparison to the Republican Party as it is.

I am a Burkean conservative, that is, one suspicious of abstract theory in politics.

In 1789 the French radicals, Robespierre, St. Just, Marat, et al., wanted to make France a Republic. Not a bad idea. And they wanted to do it all at once, according to Republicn theory.

But Robespierre would have been astonished at the idea of making Iraq a democracy of Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, all of whom have been locked in religious hostilities for quite some time. Yet in a speech at Whitehall, Bush said Iraq would become a “beacon of liberty in the Middle East.”

Robespierre would have been appalled.

A trillion dollars, 10 billion a month, carnage—all predictable.

And that’s only the begining of Bush malefactions.