Former wingnut Charles Johnson lists out the top ten reasons he parted ways with the right. Most of his points were the things that drove me away from the right as well:

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government’s minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

At one time, a tenet of my “faith” was that, generally speaking, less regulation, lower taxes, free enterprise, constrained spending (etc., etc.) were the proper prescriptions in order to support the health of our economy. I considered myself right-of-center on economic issues and well left-of-center on social issues (ergo the tag I generally used to describe myself was ‘libertarian’). I generally didn’t place too much emphasis on social issues because i subscribed to the notion that the right changes would come over time as the calcified elderly in our society died off.

I describe the above as a “tenet of my faith” because ultimately that was what it was: faith. It was not informed by a personal expertise in economics, it was informed by reading various sources who claimed to know what they were talking about and synthesizing it into my own fundamental set of tenets.

And here we come to the “crisis of faith”. The last eight years we spent under republican rule, with the almost wholesale implementation of every tenet of the conservative faith, was a catastrophic and unmitigated disaster. It is difficult to find one metric that paints the state of the country in a better position when Bush left office compared to when he came into office.

Bush and his Republican enablers in Congress presided over the largest expansion in government spending since the great depression. And, more importantly, Bush became the first President in American history to cut taxes during a time of war. Never before in our country’s history has our government decided to drain the country of tax revenue at the one fundamental time when the government unequivocally needs such revenue! There is no greater responsibility, and no greater demand on the federal treasury, than the need to support the active military operations we decide to enter into (whether such wars are justified or not). Yes, I realize that Bush and his criminally incompetent cronies thought that the wars would be a “cake walk”, that we would be “greeted as liberators”, and would probably be over in just a few short months, which would thereby negate the reckless decision to drain the treasury of revenue because, after all, it wouldn’t cost very much because it would all be over soon!