Yes, Kathleen Parker Is STILL Clueless

...as evidenced by her latest word vomit, in this morning's Chron:

What does it mean that the right cannot politely entertain dissenting opinions within its ranks?

Yes, friends and neighbors, in the Bizarro World Kathleen Parker apparently inhabits, Christopher Buckley's wholesale repudiation of conservative ideas with his endorsement of the most left-wing member of the U.S. Senate for president is nothing more than a "dissenting opinion." I think that pretty much says all that needs to be said about where she's coming from here, but there's more where that came from...

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing — the "kooks" the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right — have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.
Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of "conservatism" have brought us "a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance."

Now, I can and will concede the point here that the Republican Party isn't really that in tune with the principles of conservatism as of late, but the expansion of national debt, entitlements and so forth are proof of that — proof that the batch of Republicans running things are at heart big-government leftists. But the thing is, so is Barack Obama. So why did Chris Buckley come right out and endorse Obama, who's arguably going to give us more of the same? Why couldn't he have been a REAL iconoclast and endorsed someone like, say, Ron Paul or Fred Thompson? My money says his fellow Northeastern Establishment inbreds wouldn't approve. Or perhaps it's because, as one blogger put it, "...those candidates didn’t attend a university with a high enough U.S. News & World Report college ranking and don’t articulate their positions using the same ebullient language found in the stump speeches of Senator Obama." (By the way, the rest of that post was spot-on, too.) I'm guessing Buckley probably thinks Paul and Thompson are "irascible and snarly" too. In any event, you'll note that Kathleen Parker, like Chris Buckley, says absolutely nothing of the fact that, again, Barack Obama is going to give us more of the very things Buckley went on record to deride. Which only lends credence to those of us who regard columns like this as little more than the Northeastern elitists circling the wagons. God bless the conservative movement...with "friends" and "allies" like Kathleen Parker and Chris Buckley, we're going to need it.