Neo-conservatives always try to join their Idealism to Power by riding the wrong horses.

They rode the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon; "freedom fighters" like Angola's Jonas Savimbi or Afghan's Mujahideen; Iran-Contra; anti-Communist dictators Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein -- recall Rumsfeld's handshake -- and the Argentine junta (because, you see, if Communism triumphed, as in the Eastern Bloc, it would never be defeated by its captives). Neo-cons rode Dan Quayle, Pat Robertson, and Dick Cheney.Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush themselves rode real horses, so neo-cons rode Reagan and Bush, too.

This year, they tried to ride Giuliani (I helped stop that one) before battening onto poor John McCain. Watching them climb off for now is as painful as watching Americans evacuating Saigon in 1975.

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In an e-mail message, the journalist Jack Hitt sums up what it has all come down to: McCain, especially at his most folksy and sincere, now delivers a perfect impersonation of Dana Carvey impersonating John McCain.

That is no small trick, my friends. To believe as deeply as McCain does that he is sincere at this point requires a truly bottomless capacity for self-delusion. And that makes neo-con Field Marshall Wilhelm von Kristol McCain's perfect handler, for Kristol now resembles Carvey impersonating an un-American subversive posing as a genial pundit named Bill Kristol.

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Barack Obama likened John McCain to George W. Bush. McCain pointed out that he is not George W. Bush and insisted it's important we learn the full truth about Obama's associations with a "washed up terrorist," starting with the untruth that Obama "launched his campaign" in the washed-up terrorist's living room. McCain thereupon likened Obama to Herbert Hoover.

Neither candidate acknowledged that to rescue the American dream and really vindicate the American people, corporate capitalism will have to be reconfigured substantially enough to cause enormous transitional dislocation and pain.

Even though I always thought that William F. Buckley, Jr. had a first-class temperament but a second-class intellect, and even though I know little of what his son Christopher has accomplished and/or written over the years at National Review, the magazine his father founded, I was somewhat surprised to learn of the reaction he got from its readers (and its editor, Rich Lowry) yesterday, after endorsing Obama on his website.

Not only can't young Buckley deserve the reaction he got; the conservative movement doesn't deserve it, either. Not all TPM readers will agree with me, but America needs a better conservatism than this. It certainly deserves a better conservative spokesman than David Brooks, who, as I've noted here, hasn't shown half of Buckley's character in this time of national crisis.

I wrote here yesterday that McCain and the Republicans are forcing smart conservative and neo-conservative Republicans like New York Times columnist David Brooks to choose between their intellectual/moral self-respect and their ideological and partisan loyalties.

William F. Buckley's son Christopher has endorsed Obama. So has Ed Koch. George Will, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg and even, heaven help us, neo-con scourge Charles Krauthammer have virtually endorsed him and have certainly written off McCain/Palin.

So, what did Brooks do this morning; what does it show us; and why does it matter?

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Poor David Brooks. Really. In 2004 Nicholas Confessore detailed the New York Times columnist's maddening habit of oscillating between serious commentary and Republican hackery: In one column, Brooks would stroke his chin like a sober savant, purveying credible analysis; in the next, he'd gyrate shamelessly for ideologues and Bush operatives such as Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.

He pirouettes like this constantly to maintain some intellectual self-respect, on the one hand, and to hold onto his market niche as a conservative Republican apologist, on the other. He has tried to square this circle with forced geniality throughout Republicans' Iraq War lying, torture and warrantless surveillance, borrow-and-borrow, spend-and-spend fiscal policy, bottomless corruption, and, lately, national socialism. But John McCain is stopping Brooks' game.

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