What happened to David Brooks? He's tearing into Bush. Am I the only one who heard
this tonight?
"JIM LEHRER: Is the president still in kind of a Katrina recovery mode of his own, David, do you think?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, he is in deep trial. The National Review Magazine on the right said President Bush has never been in so much trouble with the conservatives in the history of his life. So yes. Let alone with the rest of the country. The exhaustion, the disillusionment, the worry about the cost, it's just still building.
A massive federal budget deficit
JIM LEHRER: Let's talk about the cost. You say the conservatives are upset. How upset are they and what are they going to do about it?
DAVID BROOKS: They are upset for a lot of reasons. Some of it is Katrina - anger just with reaction. A lot of it is that. Again Katrina is always the end of a long accumulation of events and for conservatives on spending, you have got a highway bill which was ridiculous, a travesty of pork barrel spending; you had an Ag bill; you had really five years in which George Bush has spent money at a faster clip than Lyndon Johnson.
JIM LEHRER: Say that again.
DAVID BROOKS: Domestic discretionary spending - non-defense spending - non-homeland security spending -- has increased.
JIM LEHRER: Non-Social Security, none all of those things -
DAVID BROOKS: -- has increased under George W. Bush twice as fast as under Bill Clinton, and faster than under Lyndon Baines Johnson. Conservatives didn't expect that in 2000. I guarantee you that. A lot of it is, frankly, the Republican Congress's fault. If you look back - when we look back on this period, we are going to look at a Congress that came preaching limited government but just has gone hog-wild in spending, and a president who never disciplined members of his own party to restrain themselves.
So there's just a lot of built-up anger and symbolically I think for a lot of conservatives there has to be what they call offsets, which are budget cuts to compensate for the cost"