Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr., endorsed Barack Obama and then resigned from his position as columnist for his dad’s magazine because of the resulting uproar. His endorsement of Obama isn’t particularly interesting, but these two paragraphs from his blog explaining his resignation are:

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

As another prominent writer put it, conservatism today “stands for war. It stands for power. It stands for spying, jailing without trial, torture, counterfeiting without limit, and lying from morning to night.” Buckley is clearly upset about the Iraq war and claims to have libertarian inclinations on certain issues. Perhaps it’s time for him to “declare, without any hesitation, to have no attachment to the idea of conservatism.”