Glenn Beck May Be Right About Something!

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A lot of people are talking about Beck. First there was his shockingly tasteless and odiously stupid comment that Obama harbors a "deep hatred of white people" in his soul. Then he more or less single-handedly got Van Jones fired from the Obama administration. And now his claim that McCain would have been worse than Obama. Neoconservatives like Mark Levin are hopping mad.

But he may be right this time. Look, when G. W. Bush stepped down, he left American saddled with a skyrocketing war debt and the beginnings of an economic depression, but he did not leave it a smoking crater. However, that is how he left the Republican party. He did it by backing a Wilsonian liberal imperialism abroad and, in order to do so, buying political capital through the pursuit of big government liberalism at home.

As bad as this was for America, it was worse for the Republican party. Not only did it disgrace the party by associating it with disastrous policy failure, but it morally and politically compromised many of its members by tempting them to become cheerleaders for policies that, given their professed principles, they should have known perfectly well were wrong. Meanwhile, principled conservatives and libertarian-leaning Republicans were pushed to the edges of the party and in some cases ruthlessly slighted by it.

That was the result of the Bush regime, and McCain would have been four more years of these horrors. If you think that a country needs at least two functioning political parties, you probably should be glad that we avoided that. Given that McCain was running against an intrinsically weak candidate like Obama, it could well have happened, too.