The alienation of voting America

by Gene Lyons

With fewer than two weeks until the presidential election, there's plenty of time for surprises. Virtually anything could still happen. But you'd never know it from the behavior of many Republican pundits and thinkers. Among GOP savants, the bitterness, recrimination and finger-pointing have already begun—a heartening sign, actually. After eight years of lock-step conformity and near-total fealty to the Bush administration's every destructive whim, one wouldn't have thought they had it in them. Needless wars ? Staggering corruption ? Illegal wiretaps ? Kidnapping ? Secret prisons ? Torture ? So-called conservatives have rationalized them all. Sarah Palin, however, many cannot abide. Alaska's winking governor, who goes around complaining that CBS' Katie Couric asked her "gotcha" questions like "What magazines and newspapers do you read ?" has become a flash point.

Christopher Buckley, sacked from the National Review, a magazine founded by his late father, William F. Buckley, after endorsing Barack Obama on Tina Brown's Web site, The Daily Beast, explains that he initially was captivated by Palin's backwoods charm.

"But it's kind of like dating a supermodel," he says. "There comes a moment, unfortunately, where they start talking."

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