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MOMENT OF TRIUMPH
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The next time some "journalist" reports that liberals and/or Democrats are opposing Bush, leaving out Republicans oppose him on whatever too, just remember these guys. The libertarian-leaning Cato Institute has been calling Bush's conservative bluff for some time. Now, even conservatives are figuring out that Bush's conservatism is nothing but a cover for a massive theft of public funds, resources, and credit.
You don't have to be a liberal to know Bush has failed.
Being a liberal just makes it easier to be honest about it.
America may be paying the price, but it's conservatives in particular who now realize they've been the victims of identity theft.
"We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come," explained David Boaz, the think tank's executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. "We didn't get that."
Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation?
Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," Bartlett called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."
It might also have had something to do with speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Author of the forthcoming "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back," Sullivan called Bush "reckless" and "a socialist," and accused him of betraying "almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for."
Nor was moderator Boaz a voice of moderation. He blamed Bush for "a 48 percent increase in spending in just six years," a "federalization of public schools" and "the biggest entitlement since LBJ."
True, the small-government libertarians represented by Cato have always been the odd men out of the Bush coalition. But the standing-room-only forum yesterday, where just a single questioner offered even a tepid defense of the president, underscored some deep disillusionment among conservatives over Bush's big-spending answer to Medicare and Hurricane Katrina, his vast claims of executive power, and his handling of postwar Iraq.
Bartlett, who lost his job at the free-market National Center for Policy Analysis because of his book, said that if conservatives were honest, more would join his complaint. "They're reticent to address the issues that I've raised for fear that they might have to agree with them," he told the group. "And a lot of Washington think tanks and groups of that sort, they know that this White House is very vindictive."
Well, as Bartlett has discovered the hard way, think tanks aren't about thinking. Think tanks were established to provide a phony intellectual patina for whatever their owners already wanted to hear anyway.
People at think tanks are basically just Ph.D.'s as spokesmodels. I know, that's gross.
Bartlett ... began by predicting a big tax increase "to finance the inevitable growth of government that is in the pipeline that President Bush is largely responsible for." He also said many fellow conservatives don't know about the "quite dreadful" traits of the administration, such as the absence of "anybody who does any serious analysis" on policy issues.
Boaz assured the audience that he told the White House that "if there's a rebuttal to what Bruce has said, please come and provide it."
Instead, Sullivan was on hand to second the critique. "This is a big-government agenda," he said. "It is fueled by a new ideology, the ideology of Christian fundamentalism." The bearded pundit offered his own indictment of Bush: "complete contempt" for democratic processes, torture of detainees, ignoring habeas corpus and a "vast expansion of the federal government." The notion, he said, that the "Thatcher-Reagan legacy that many of us grew up to love and support would end this way is an astonishing paradox and a great tragedy."
The question period gave the two a chance to come up with new insults.
"If Bush were running today against Bill Clinton, I'd vote for Clinton," Bartlett served.
Bill Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower.
"You have to understand the people in this administration have no principles," Sullivan volleyed. "Any principles that get in the way of the electoral map have to be dispensed with."
OK, I just puked in my mouth. I ACTUALLY AGREE WITH SULLIVAN. Holy crap. STrandge bedfellows and all that.
Are we really going to have to make common-cause with these guys? Make an alliance with our future opponents just so we can take out our common enemy, the enemy of our Republic's interests, principles, and people?
Um ... OK. I'm cool with that.
Boaz renewed his plea. "Any Bush economists hiding in the audience?"
There was, in fact, one Bush Treasury official on the attendance roster, but he did not surface. The only man who came close to defending Bush, environmental conservative Fred Singer, said he was "willing to overlook" the faults because of the president's Supreme Court nominations. Even Richard Walker, representing the think tank that fired Bartlett, declined to argue. "I agree with most of it," he said later.
Unchallenged, the Bartlett-Sullivan tag team continued. "The entire intellectual game has been given away by the Republican president," said Sullivan. "He's a socialist in so many respects, a Christian socialist."
Bartlett argued that Richard Nixon "is the model for everything Bush is doing."
Sullivan said Karl Rove's political strategy is "pathetic."
Bartlett said that "the administration lies about budget numbers."
"He is not a responsible human being; he is a phenomenally reckless human being," Sullivan proclaimed. "There is a level of recklessness involved that is beyond any ideology."
"Gosh," Boaz interjected. "I wish we had a senior White House aide up here."
You know, I could find common ground with a real conservative. Hell, on some issues I'm closer to real conservatives than I am to most of the good folks here on Daily KOS. It's only the radical rightwing Bush administration that has to send its
flying Leninist monkeys out to attack every critic and opponent as if they were
endangering us all. They do that to us and they do it to conservatives who won't betray their principles for the Bush administration.
I miss conservatives, too.
No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one.
They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat, really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don't have a party ...), but I genuinely liked them.
How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?
Their Southern Strategy came home to roost, that's what happened. Formerly a rust-belt and Yankee party, the GOP cashed in on everyone in the south who was disgusted with LBJ's shocking lack of pious bigotry. For a while, the bigots had to come in through the servants' entrance, but they burst into the ballroom in 1980 and demanded a rollback of the 20th century, the destruction of the time of America's greatest power and their greatest irrelevance. Cargo-cult "Christianity" was the order of the day and everyone who disagreed was a hater. Every inconvenient fact, like the systematic and systemic failure of their every policy, was the work of a hater. They squirreled themselves away in a nutshell of privileged ignorance and counted themselves kings of infinite space, about which they proudly knew nothing.
The capillary action of the GOP's mid-century desperation sucked this know-nothing filth up into the halls of power. Even Andrew Jackson would have gagged.
The GOP's elite had gained the country but lost their party. And it would get worse. In a match made in the third world, the addle-pated scion of a carpetbagger family led these Tooth-Gnashers of Gawd on a long march into their own navel and there they pitched their tent, thinking God would provide. Impregnable in their solipsism, happily mistaking bribes for popularity and corruption for success, they flattered themselves that they knew truth from falsehood, balance from bias, merely by sense of smell, by whether or not it resonated in the shallow tin-can of half-remembered histories and the garbled blood-taboos of an ancient wandering desert tribe. Failure in Iraq went into the bin along with all those dinosaur bones Satan hid in the ground to confuse us. The jury would
always be out on our economic woes and global warming.
Outside Castle Fuckwit, however, everything is falling down. Republicans:
let's make a deal. You save your party, we'll save ours. Then we can leave this failed presidency and this Lost Decade behind. If you don't, it'll hang around your neck like an albatross for the rest of your life and into the next generation, bigger than Nixon. People like me will see to it.
We have our own problems, but we aren't affiliated with Miserable Failure. This administration is so far right that they've abandoned the center and even the center-right. The vast majority of Americans are waiting for someone to pay attention to their real interests, someone to ride to their rescue.
If we solve our problems before you solve yours, you're fucked forever. Race ya!
Your own best interests, believe it or not, lead toward common ground.
Your move, conservatives.
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