Better Listen To Keith Richards

A couple of days ago, I posted about the fact that Christopher Buckley, who had a column in The National Review, the ultra-right wing magazine that his father founded in 1955, had come out in support for Barack Obama for President.

According to a post in The Caucus, the New York Times' poltical blog, Buckley, who recieved reams of hate-emails at both "The Daily Beast," the blog he wrote the endorsement in, and The National Review, the conservative publication that his father founded and in which he wrote a column for. Buckley responded by resigning from The National Review, stating "I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me."

The party has spent the last 20 years increasingly pandering to the far-right religious nut wing of the party-- Sarah Palin was a glaring example of that-- and is now paying the price.

I've mentioned before how back in the ninties, arch-conservative Barry Goldwater-- whose seat John McCain filled upon his retirement from the Senate-- warned the Republican Party that it had gone too far to the right, particularly on the issues of abortion rights and gay rights. I remember thinking at the time that if Barry Goldwater tells you you've gone too far to the right, it was like Keith Richards telling you that you're doing to many drugs. Now another prominent conservative has gotten off of the sinking ship, along with others, including Christopher Hitchens.

Ironically, there are states like Indiana and North Carolina in which some pundits think may go Democratic for the first time since 1964-- when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater.

Senator Goldwater seemed to have learned his lesson. Looks like his party didn't.