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"[Bush] has made very, very bad decisions as president, and the
invasion of Iraq is, I think, the worst decision any American
president has made, certainly since World War II, and perhaps longer.
And it's made -- if democracy means anything, somebody who makes a
decision like that has to be thrown out of office"

= = =

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
American Conservative Magazine Endorses Kerry

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John Kerry received an endorsement from what many thought was an
unlikely source: The American Conservative magazine. We speak with the
author of the magazine's editorial, Scott McConnell. [includes rush
transcript]

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More than 220 newspapers across the country are endorsing John Kerry
for president, far more than President Bush. But last week, Kerry
received an endorsement from what many would call the most unlikely of
sources: "The American Conservative." The magazine is edited by
three-time presidential candidate and conservative pundit Pat
Buchanan.

In the article endorsing Kerry, the American Conservative writes: "The
only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives
and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is
if Kerry is elected. If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in
opposition from Inauguration Day forward."

    * Scott McConnell, executive editor of The American Conservative.
He is the author of the article in the Nov. 8th issue titled "Kerry's
the one."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined right now by Scott McConnell, who is
executive editor of The American Conservative, author of the article
on the November 8 issue, endorsing Kerry. The headline: "Kerry is the
One." Why are you so critical of George Bush?

SCOTT McCONNELL: Well, he has made very, very bad decisions as
president, and the invasion of Iraq is, I think, the worst decision
any American president has made, certainly since World War II, and
perhaps longer. And it's made -- if democracy means anything, somebody
who makes a decision like that has to be thrown out of office.

AMY GOODMAN: Go through the key issues that you feel that President
Bush has betrayed you on.

SCOTT McCONNELL: Well, first, adopting a kind of wildly ambitious,
reckless neoconservative foreign policy, which is quite the antithesis
of his father's foreign policy, which was always prudent and sensible,
and multilateral. And that led to the Iraq invasion, which is, I
think, made the whole problem dealing with Islamic terrorism much,
much more difficult. But secondly, he has very un-conservative ideas
about immigration. He floated earlier this year an idea of giving work
visas to anybody in the world who was offered a job in which there
wasn't an American taker, which is essentially an invitation for all
American employees who want to pay people $5 an hour to say, you know
-- to Bangladesh or wherever, to try to essentially really change the
whole labor market in America to the detriment of the American
workers. And the tax cuts without any spending cut has led to a really
bad deficit problem. But I have to say --

AMY GOODMAN: I'm just going to interrupt for a second. Are you
listening on your radio as well?

SCOTT McCONNELL: I'm not, but I'm getting a very fuzzy connection
here.

AMY GOODMAN: We're speaking to Scott McConnell. We're just going to
switch lines on you for one moment. As we do that, Scott McConnell is
the executive editor of The American Conservative magazine. And the
magazine came out supporting John Kerry, not George Bush, although
Patrick Buchanan, whose birthday it is today, one of the founders of
this magazine, has endorsed George Bush. If you could continue with
your rationale for why you are not supporting the republican
president?

SCOTT McCONNELL: Well, a third reason is I think a Bush second term
would be as bad as the first, and it would be -- it has a way of -- I
mean, I think of conservatism as kind of an ideology of prudence in
government and, you know, lack -- sort of respect for -- in the human
nature and like -- and if Bush, a second Bush term, I think, is likely
to discredit conservatism for a long, long time to come. But I have to
say that for all of us, and there's a number of anti-war
conservatives, the Iraq war is pretty much the defining issue. I mean,
if Bush is -- you know, you want more ability to overlook his, you
know, type of deficits, I don't think many conservatives would want to
put in a democrat just because they disapproved of Bush's fiscal
policy or a skepticism about, you know, No Child Left Behind or
something like that.

AMY GOODMAN: So what about the Iraq war? From the beginning, have you
opposed it, and when you talk about anti-war conservatives, how large
a bloc are you?

SCOTT McCONNELL: I don't think it's a really large electoral bloc, but
think it's a fairly large number of academics and people who write
articles and people who pay a lot of attention to foreign policy. That
is to say, maybe 10% or 15% or 20% of � I mean, if you look, like The
New York Times a couple of days ago ran an ad calling for withdrawal
from Iraq and was signed mostly by academics. Almost all of them had
supported President Bush, his election and all of � and who had
supported, you know, Ronald Reagan's election. And so, you know, this
is like enough to make a big ad in The New York Times. That's, you
know, it's not a huge number of voters. I mean, I have to say that
President Bush has a lock on the Republican Party right now in voting
sense. But we started this magazine in September of 2002, and it was
clear then that the neoconservatives wanted to take the � you know,
they had a plan for American military domination of the Middle East.
They were thinking, you know, Iraq, perhaps Syria, Iran. There's like
a large list of governments that they � these regimes they wanted to
change. Regime change is a nice soft sounding word for it. And we were
skeptical from the beginning, that we knew that this wasn't going to
work out, and that they were -- we were very sure they were wildly
optimistic about Americans being welcomed by open arms in Iraq, and
you know, there was a fair number of reporting in our magazine and
others about how the intelligence claiming that Saddam had these
stockpiles, was close to a nuclear weapon and stuff, was kind of being
distorted by the civilian officials in the Pentagon, and it was not
what mainstream intelligence officials in the State Department and the
C.I.A. thought.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, "If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in
opposition from inauguration day forward."

SCOTT McCONNELL: Yes. Well, we're not liberals, and John Kerry is. I
mean, I wish John Kerry well, if he's elected, in extricating the
United States from Iraq. That would probably involve getting some help
from Europeans and other allies. I'm not sure if it's too late for
that or not, but we're not going to be wildly enthusiastic. On
immigration, Kerry is just as bad as Bush. On -- I mean, we're not --
we're not -- probably some of us may go on to become democrats, but
we're not there yet.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Scott McConnell, I want to thank you for being with
us, executive editor of The American Conservative. He wrote the piece
in The American Conservative endorsing Kerry, called "Kerry is the
One." This is Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/02/1522253