A Republican Loss?

Does the GOP need to lose to Barack? Some conservatives are saying so.

Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, believes that after eight years under Bush, the Republicans need to lose November's election to reinvent their thinking and policy platform.

"For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one," he wrote in The American Conservative magazine.

I don't buy this need to lose talk - not that there's much of it. Why can't President McCain will be able to oversee a redirection of the GOP just fine, especially with the dems in control of congress?

But thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama, Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Bacevich -- all vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq -- dislike Republican candidate John McCain and see something alluring in his Democratic rival.

Fukuyama, the conservative author of the post-Cold War treatise "The End of History and the Last Man," said on a visit to Sydney last month that the Republicans were a spent force intellectually.

He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that many on the right of US politics believe "Obama probably has the greatest promise of delivering a different kind of politics" that breaks with decades of Republican orthodoxy."

This makes absolutely no sense. If you're conservative, how do you see things as being improved by putting the Dems into total control of the government with a radical at the helm? All this because John McCain being wrong on a few issues upsets you so much?

The Illinois senator would end not just the war in Iraq but the war of ideology, Sullivan argued way back in December, before Obama's candidacy truly caught fire with his victory in the Iowa caucuses.

"It is a war about war -- and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama -- and Obama alone -- offers the possibility of a truce," he wrote in The Atlantic.

Anyone who thinks that Barack would be able to end the war faster than McCain is simply not paying attention.