Rod Dreher: President Betrayed Base Just When He Needed It Most

(Hat tip: Professor Bainbridge)

From the Dallas Morning News:

William F. Buckley, American conservatism's gray eminence, was recently asked by a writer for The New Yorker what he thought about the state of the movement he helped found 50 years ago. Said Mr. Buckley, "I'm not happy about it." More and more of us on the right feel his pain.

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American conservatism is in crisis at the moment because the bizarre Harriet Miers nomination imposed a surreality check on the right, forcing us to consider just how much nonsense we had gone along with for the sake of party discipline.

Where to start? With the LBJ-level spending? The signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, which candidate Bush had denounced as unconstitutional? The race-preferences sellout in the University of Michigan cases?

There was also the cynical use of the federal marriage amendment, which the administration dropped after turning out the social conservative vote in 2004. And grass-roots conservatives cite the president's intent to liberalize immigration policy with Mexico.

Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.

On top of this came the Katrina debacle, which further damaged conservatism's claim to competent governance.

Conservatives, consciously or not, looked the other way for far too long, mostly because we felt it important to back the president in wartime and because nothing was more important to the various tribes of Red State Nation than recapturing the Supreme Court. For the first time in a generation, a conservative Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate made that dream a real possibility.

Whatever else Mr. Bush might fumble, we trusted him to get that right.

Instead, he gave us a crony pick of no extraordinary constitutional expertise or discernible vision, except for love of Our Lord and George W. Bush, and support for racial preferences. This is what we drank the Rovian Kool-Aid for? The Miers selection was no isolated incident, but the tipping point in a series of betrayals.

(emphasis added)

My Comments:
Yeah, what Rod said!