The Liberal Case for Bush

An interesting column at Tech Central Station got me thinking:

Even after the Vietnam War -- at least when Clinton was president -- the Democrats had the right temperament for guns-and-butter liberalism abroad. The intervention against Slobo's regime in Serbia wasn't slammed as a "unilateral war." It was the Peace Corps with muscles.

But when George W. Bush implemented the Clinton Administration's policy of regime-change in Iraq, democratic nation-building morphed into "imperialism." Overthrowing a totalitarian regime was deemed "reckless." What mattered most was "stability." Just as September 11 taught George W. Bush that liberals had a point all along, liberals started to sound like... conservatives.

I had a feeling that maybe I haven't changed as much as the parties have.

But most [liberal activists] haven't even noticed that George W. Bush has turned Henry Kissinger's noxious "realist" game on its head. He couldn't have made it more clear when he gave the commencement address at the Air Force Academy in June 2004:

"For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy."

There you have it. This is exactly what liberals have demanded for decades. And now that Bush veers to the left he is jeered by the left for being "reckless," "extremist," "imperialist," and even "fascist." That's precisely the reason some of the left's most stout-hearted members, most famously Christopher Hitchens himself, ditched their old comrades to forge an alliance with the neoconservative right.

Read it all for more reasons for good liberals to vote Republican this year.