I’ve been fairly disconnected from all things Ron Paul lately, but the American Conservative Magazine reports some interesting news:

Apparently, Ron Paul’s plan to stick with the presidential race for the purpose of gathering support and changing GOP policy is working at the grassroots level.

Rush and other pundits kept saying that this upcoming election was not going to be about the Iraq war. They’re wrong. And they’re especially wrong if it’s McCain vs. Obama. Sullivan makes the point well today. McCain doesn’t want to talk about the wisdom of going into Iraq in the first place. Hillary will go along with that just fine. Obama won’t. I keep trying to find a silver lining about this upcoming election, and one of them is definitely this: McCain vs. Obama will make us revisit the notion of pre-emptive war, which is a good thing.

Oh, and here’s Buckley on Bush:

Bill Buckley had come to recognize the degraded state of American conservatism. In 2006, he deplored Bush’s “absence of effective conservative ideology – with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending.” And he noted the failure of Bush’s expansive, interventionist foreign policy.

“If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign,” Buckley told CBS News. No “successor would reenunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious.”

Yes, it’s happening, and not just among weirdo conservatives that no one’s heard of. Jeffrey Hart is a Burkean conservative was a speechwriter for Reagan and former writer for NRO (HT to De Regno Christi)

Jeffrey Hart sat at his kitchen table in slippers, reading Barack Obama’s words aloud. The retired Dartmouth professor, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, wore on his shirt an artifact of the 1900 Republican presidential ticket — a McKinley-Roosevelt pin.

“I am not opposed to all wars,” Hart intoned, quoting a 2002 speech before the Illinois State Legislature in which Obama, then a state senator, had warned of the perils of invading Iraq. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Looking up from the page, Hart nodded his approval.

“Very Burkean,” he said, referring to the 18th century Irish political writer Edmund Burke, hailed by many as the founder of modern conservatism. “Prudential. A sense of history, and what we’re up against there.”

I bet he freaked when McCain invoked Burke in his CPAC speech. I know I did. It seems to me that a growing number of conservatives are coming to the conclusion that Iraq was simply not a conservative war. The neocons duped us. (And I include myself in that “us.”)

Thoughts?