I have two links to one of the Maximum Leader’s favorite conservative pundits.

The first is for the Foreign Minister - A consumer dissatisfication rant on par with Greg’s Popeyes diatribe.

And a discussion of why a conservative will vote against Bush. Read the comments thread - there is a good deal of reasoned, civil, give-and-take exchange going on. I wish all political discussion could be as noble.

Some selected excerpts for you non-clicking-throughasaurouses:

If the Senator from Massachusetts thinks that improved style, greater diplomatic
efforts, concerted multilateral coordination, and even copious amounts of
American aid can get India and Pakistan to sign on to the Non-Proliferation
Treaty or create a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace, then, well, he’s drunk
too much of the multilateral Kool-Aid. Bill Clinton — who epitomizes the kind
of diplomatic style Kerry could only hope to achieve — invested a fair amount
of diplomatic capital on both of these flash points, during a time when
America’s global prestige was greater than today — and in the end achieved very
little of consequence. There are international problems where the conflict of
interests are so sharp and the stakes are so high for the affected parties that
all the outside diplomacy in the world won’t achieve anything. And I can’t help
but wonder if Kerry believes he can somehow talk radical Islamists into
submission.
So I’m troubled by this — but at this point I’m more troubled
by the Bush administration. Robert A.
George has a New Republic column that encapsulates a lot of my difficulties
voting for the GOP ticket this year. Here’s the part that hit home for me:
President Bush has failed to live up to the second key tenet of conservative
government: accountability.
Take, for example, the Pentagon’s disastrous
planning for postwar Iraq. The lack of troops for the post-invasion period
enabled the insurgency to bloom and put American soldiers at risk. Worse, while
memos from Ashcroft’s Justice Department seemingly provided legal cover for the
abuse at Abu Ghraib, the material causes could be found, again, in the
underdeployment of troops: “What went wrong at Abu Ghraib prison?” asked The New
York Post’s Ralph Peters, one of the more earnest supporters of invading Iraq.
Pointing to the two independent reports examining the scandal, he concludes:
“Woefully deficient planning for post-war Iraq, too few troops and inadequate
leadership at the top.” Peters is among the conservatives who believe the Abu
Ghraib fiasco should have been the final straw for Rumsfeld.
But it didn’t
happen. And it won’t happen, because accountability is a foreign word in this
administration. To demonstrate how little he has learned, Rumsfeld observed,
“Does [the abuse] rank up there with chopping off someone’s head on television?
It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Was it done as a matter of policy? No.” Forget that the
abuse was far more pervasive than just the handful of servicemen that first
popped up in photographs; when the secretary of defense basically says, “Hey,
what the terrorists do is much worse,” the moral foundation upon which America
stands begins to crumble. The president’s stated goal was to try to bring
democracy to the Middle East–not to allow us to become tainted by the barbarism
so prevalent in the region we are attempting to liberate. So Rumsfeld stays
on–even as the situation rapidly deteriorates.
Then again, this shouldn’t
come as a surprise: George Tenet remained in his position following the worst
intelligence failure in U.S. history, enabling him to tell the president later
that evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” The
first failure helped lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans; the second
failure led us into a conflict from which there exists no clear exit strategy
and that has rendered the word of the United States suspect. Yet Tenet stayed
on, too.
And no wonder. As Bob Woodward writes in Plan of Attack, “[S]everal
things were clear from the president’s demeanor, his style and all that [Colin]
Powell had learned about Bush. The president was not going to toss anyone over
the side…. The president also made it clear that no one was to jump ship….
They were a team. The larger message was clear: Circle the wagons.” The larger
message is that loyalty is prized above all, regardless of the results and
regardless of the effect on U.S. standing in the world….
No, a Kerry
administration would not be any conservative’s ideal. But, on limited
government, a Democratic president would, arguably, force a Republican Congress
to act like a Republican Congress. The last such combination produced some form
of fiscal sanity. And, when it comes to accountabilit, one could hardly do
worse. Of course, a conservative can still cast a libertarian vote on principle.
At crucial points before and after the Iraq war, Bush’s middle managers have
failed him, and the “brand” called America has suffered in the world market. In
any other corporate structure plagued by this level of incompetence, the CEO
would have a choice: Fire his middle managers or be held personally accountable
by his shareholders. Because of his own misguided sense of “loyalty,” Bush won’t
dismiss anyone. That leaves the country’s shareholders little choice.

Given the foreign policy stakes in this election, I prefer a leader who has a good decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I don’t like, over a leader who has a bad decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I do like.