Add the name of professor and blogger (foreignpolicy.com) Daniel W. Drezner to the list of prominent conservatives who have had enough with Republican’s destructive and self-serving brand of politics.

I’m not a Democrat, and I don’t think I’ve become more liberal over time.  That said, three things have affected my political loyalties over the past few years.  First, I’ve become more uncertain about various dimensions of GOP ideology over time.  It’s simply impossible for me to look at the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis and not ponder the myriad ways in which my party has made some categorical errors in judgment.   So I’m a bigger fan of the politics of doubt during an era when doubt has been banished in political discourse.

Second, the GOP has undeniably shifted further to the right over the past few years, and while I’m sympathetic to some of these shifts, most of it looks like a mutated version of “cargo cult science” directed at either Ludwig Von Mises or the U.S. Constitution (which, of course, is sacred and inviolate, unless conservatives want to amend it).  Sorry, I’m not embracing outdated concepts like the gold standard or repealing the 16th Amendment.  Not happening.

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Also, things that weren’t said are now being said.  Or, to be more precise, things that use to be said but ignored are now being taken seroiusly by the GOP’s leading lights.  Newt Gingrich endorses the notion that Obama has a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.  Mitt Romney claims Obama has been apologizing around the world and no longer believes in American exceptionalism.  …  There’s good, solid partisanship — a vital necessity in this country – and then there’s unadulterated horses**t.  Too much of the GOP’s rhetoric on Obama reads like the latter to me. 

So for those reasons, I really am a Republican in Name Only at this point.

Refreshing and certainly better late than never.  I’ve often wondered how thinking conservatives (yes, those in possession of a real brain with the ability to reason and discern truth from fiction) could remain loyal to a party that gave them George W. Bush and Sarah Palin.  I’m not referring to your run-of-the-mill teabagger or Fox News devotee.  Those people would vote for a barnyard pig if it had an ‘R’ tattooed to its butt and O’Reilly or Limbaugh praised the pig’s wonderful record of achievement.

I’m referring to the Frum/Sullivan type of staunch conservative who have not abdicated their right to think objectively.  How did they carry on through those eight painful years of neoconservative abuse and neglect?  I imagine it takes a certain amount of time and soul searching for one to come to grips with the realization that a loved one has gone mad.  I would think that for most intelligent and rational people, justifying political insanity becomes more difficult over time.

Again…better late than never.

I much enjoyed Andrew Sullivan’s response when asked by Howard Kurtz on how he reconciles his current harsh criticism of Republicans with his own conservatism.  “Because I’m still a conservative and they are not.”  Nice.

As I’ve noted before, if the Republican party is to ever survive its current crippling onslaught of madness on conservatism, it will be because of the efforts of strong minded conservatives like Drezner, Frum and Sullivan who are willing to call out the empty-headed emperor when he is caught wearing no clothes.  And these days, the emperor has made the conscious decision to burn his entire wardrobe.

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