And the hits keep on coming.
Washington Monthly runs an article called "Time For Us To Go", a collection of essays from dyed in the wool conservatives who want to see the GOP lose this November for the sake of Conservatism. The authors range from the respectable and principled (Bruce Fein), the borderline loony (Richard Viguerie), the goofy (Christopher Buckley), the blowdried (Joe Scarbourough), and a few more of whom I haven't heard. What unites them?
With Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, conservatives these days ought to be happy, but most aren't. They see expanding government, runaway spending, Middle East entanglements, and government corruption, and they wonder why, exactly, the country should be grateful for Republican dominance. Some accuse Bush and the Republicans today of not being true conservatives. Others see a grab bag of stated policies and wonder how they cohere. Everyone thinks something's got to change.
Pop up some popcorn, kick back, relax and enjoy the cannibalism...
Christopher Buckley wants to
"Quit While We're Behind". Like Lincoln Chaffee, Buckley longs for the days of Bush I and (gulp!) Richard Nixon, when
The Republican Party I grew up into--Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan--stood for certain things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era--often, it fell flat on its face. A self-proclaimed "conservative," Nixon kept the Great Society entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls. Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it "Voodoo economics." You could Google it.
There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the '69-'75 chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were compensating triumphs: Eisenhower's refusal to bail out France in Indochina in 1954, Nixon's China opening, the Cold War victory.
Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles.
George Tenet's WMD "slam-dunk," Vice President Cheney's "we will be greeted as liberators," Don Rumsfeld's avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves "neo-conservative" (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others' throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000--with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons--bright people, all--are now clamoring, "On to Tehran!"
He laments that at least when old-school Republicans messed up, they KNEW they messed up. I dont know about that, but that the crew running things today has NO CLUE or DOESN'T CARE that they are messing things up grandly. I can agree with that.
Bruce Bartlett, that super disgruntled former staffer who was hung out to dry by his bosses, says, "Bring On Pelosi". I say, "Right on, brother!"
As a conservative who's interested in the long-term health of both my country and the Republican Party, I have a suggestion for the GOP in 2006: lose. Handing over at least one house of Congress to the other side of the aisle for the next two years would probably be good for everyone. It will improve governance in the country, and it will increase the chances of GOP gains in 2008...Ronald Reagan had to contend with a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives for all eight years of his presidency. This was no barrier to genuinely popular legislation, such as the 1981 tax cut. The White House simply had to work harder and make better arguments for its program. And Democratic control of the House helped make the 1986 Tax Reform Act one of the few major tax bills in history to which both Republicans and Democrats still point with pride. Similarly, Bill Clinton faced divided government for six of his eight years, and those years gave us the 1996 welfare-reform bill, which continues to have broad support.
These laws endured because they had legitimacy. It's unlikely that either party would single-handedly have produced anything as good. Indeed, one-party government encourages the majority to pass legislation using votes only from its own side and usually leads it to bargain first with those on its own extremes (those least willing to compromise on anything) instead of moderates across the aisle. This almost guarantees that controversial lawmaking will be the norm.
In other words, instead of passing legislation because "The President wants it", the Republicans would actually have to articulate a reason to pass a particular piece of legislation other than "If you are against this piece of legislation, you are standing with Osama".
Joe Scarborough is "Shocked, SHOCKED!" that the Republicans are presiding over an unprecedented expansion of government and spending like drunken sailors on shore leave (something I know a lot about, being a sailor myself). What I don't quite get is, if he knew that Bush was a coke-snorting, dry drunk going into the Presidency, how could he title his piece "And we thought Clinton had
no self-control"?
The terminally rumpled Dick Armey (R-Whiskey Gulch) even went so far as to suggest that the Clintons might be Marxists, drawing an angry personal rebuke from Bubba himself...But compare Clinton's 3.4 percent growth rate to the spending orgy that has dominated Washington since Bush moved into town. With Republicans in charge of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, spending growth has averaged 10.4 percent per year. And the GOP's reckless record goes well beyond runaway defense costs. The federal education bureaucracy has exploded by 101 percent since Republicans started running Congress. Spending in the Justice Department over the same period has shot up 131 percent, the Commerce Department 82 percent, the Department of Health and Human Services 81 percent, the State Department 80 percent, the Department of Transportation 65 percent, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development 59 percent. Incredibly, the four bureaucracies once targeted for elimination by the GOP Congress--Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development--have enjoyed spending increases of an average of 85 percent.
It's enough to make economic conservatives long for the day when Marxists were running the White House.
Somehow, Scarborough almost makes me believe that if only the Clenis had kept his zipper zipped, he'd take the place of Reagan in the Pantheon of Conservative Presidents.
Bruce Fein,who always comes across as principled and agreeable when I hear him on the Diane Rehm Show where he is a regular on the Friday News Roundup, sounds almost Glenn Greenwald-esque in his biting, bitter piece on unchecked Presidential power and the Republican Congress' acquiesence in an unprecedented power grab. If you read only one of these essays, this is the one to read!
The most conservative principle of the Founding Fathers was distrust of unchecked power. Centuries of experience substantiated that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition to avert abuses or tyranny. The Constitution embraced a separation of powers to keep the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in equilibrium. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive."
But a Republican Congress has done nothing to thwart President George W. Bush's alarming usurpations of legislative prerogatives. Instead, it has largely functioned as an echo chamber of the White House.
SNIP
The most frightening claim made by Bush with congressional acquiescence is reminiscent of the lettres de cachet of prerevolutionary France. (Such letters, with which the king could order the arrest and imprisonment of subjects without trial, helped trigger the storming of the Bastille.) In the aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Bush maintained that he could pluck any American citizen out of his home or off of the sidewalk and detain him indefinitely on the president's finding that he was an illegal combatant. No court could second-guess the president. Bush soon employed such monarchial power to detain a few citizens and to frighten would-be dissenters, and Republicans in Congress either cheered or fiddled like Nero while the Constitution burned.
Republicans have shied from challenging Bush by placing party loyalty above institutional loyalty, contrary to the expectations of the Founding Fathers. They do so in the fear that embarrassing or discrediting a Republican president might reverberate to their political disadvantage in a reverse coat-tail effect.
Bruce Fein speaks. You listen.
I am heartened to see that even editors at the National Review, like Jeffrey Hart are as disturbed by modern day conservatism's fantastical adherence to ideology and the takeover of conservatism by religious fanatics -
Today, the standard-bearer of "conservatism" in the United States is George W. Bush, a man who has taken the positions of an unshakable ideologue: on supply-side economics, on privatization, on Social Security, on the Terri Schiavo case, and, most disastrously, on Iraq. Never before has a United States president consistently adhered to beliefs so disconnected from actuality.
SNIP
Perhaps most damaging to the ideal of conservatism has been the influence of religious ideology. During the fight over whether to remove the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetal state for 15 years, politicians began to say strange and feverish things. "She talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort," Majority whip Tom DeLay said of a woman for whom cognition of any kind was impossible. (Oxygen deprivation had liquefied her cerebral cortex.) Senate Majority leader Bill Frist examined Schiavo on videotape and deemed her "clearly responsive." As Schiavo's case fought its way through the courts, Republicans savaged judges for consistently sanctioning the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube. "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," threatened DeLay.
That members of the judiciary were being chastised for responding to the law as written rather than looking, presumably, to some sort of divine guidance was hardly surprising. In 2002, Bush himself had said, "We need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God." In this chilling use of the word "God," the president made his views on the rule of law all too clear. The conservative writer Andrew Sullivan has aptly coined the term "Christianism" to refer to this merger of religiosity and politics.
Where was this guy during the Schiavo episode, and why wasn't he screaming this in the pages of the National Review?
And finally, Richard Viguerie, whom I normally detest, delivers a devistating indictment of modern ruling conservatism and says "The Show Must Not Go On" - can I get a hallalujah, brother?
With their record over the past few years, the Big Government Republicans in Washington do not merit the support of conservatives. They have busted the federal budget for generations to come with the prescription-drug benefit and the creation and expansion of other programs. They have brought forth a limitless flow of pork for the sole, immoral purpose of holding onto office. They have expanded government regulation into every aspect of our lives and refused to deal seriously with mounting domestic problems such as illegal immigration. They have spent more time seeking the favors of K Street lobbyists than listening to the conservatives who brought them to power. And they have sunk us into the very sort of nation-building war that candidate George W. Bush promised to avoid...
Dont bother reading the rest of the essay because it is bullshit, except for the statement that the loss of the '64 election was a chance for the Republicans to clear the party of dead wood - precisely what the Republicans need today.
Well, another day, another example of the Republicans moving ever closer to eating their own. I hope they all get kuru while Pelosi becomes speaker...