It's a point I've attempted to make more than once before, but a difficult one to make in the atmosphere of the current American mindset. Truthspeaker goes out of his way to make it again, effectively.

Iraq and it's impact on the U.S. and the world's ability to respond to international terrorism is the most important issue in this election, and it has nothing to do with liberalism or conservativism. It even has very little to do with hawkishness or dovishness. It has to do with good policy versus bad policy, and George Bush is firmly on the side of bad policy.

Conservatives who have hitched their stars to Bush's brand of conservativism that comes complete with fiscal irresponsibility and foreign policy radicalism would do well to ask themselves whether it is this kind of leadership that they want defining the future of the conservative movement. The wiser and more conservative among them will decide not. For them, a vote against Bush is a vote for the future of conservativism, at the price of four years of unabashedly liberal policy.

The rest of the conservatives... the ones who will cheerlead for Bush no matter how giant his blunders: we can safely consign them to the category of those whose greatest hunger is for power, not the advancement of society under conservative principles.