BUYER'S REMORSE.

BUYER'S REMORSE. This gloriously frank piece is getting a decent amount of blogo-buzz this morning, and it's got me to thinking that the current buyer's remorse among "principled" conservatives makes me want to vomit.

I am not really having any fun attacking my old friends -- but I don�t know how else to respond when people call decent men like Jim Webb a pervert for no other reason than to win an election. I don�t know how to deal with people who think savaging a man with Parkinson�s for electoral gain is appropriate election-year discourse."

Hey, John. Michael Dukakis was a decent man. Al Gore was a decent man, and so was John Kerry. Max Cleland and Tom Daschle were decent men. Newt Gingrich, a supremely indecent man, made his career attacking decent men. Going back further, because I'm old enough to remember that vicious closet-case Terry Dolan and his NCPAC campaigns, Frank Church and George McGovern were decent men. It's not enough to decide that the tactics that empowered your political philosophy are suddenly odious because they've empowered a feckless incompetent. Repentance before redemption, boys. Rise from the fainting couches and pick up the flagellum. As the nuns used to say, I don't think you've sufficiently examined your consciences.

--Charles P. Pierce