Now that’s funny!
January 14th, 2008, 10:53 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
In Sunday’s Daily News, columnist Steven Greenhut grumbles that “the Republican Party has lost touch with its conservative roots” and that the supporters of his foreign policy are “so called conservatives.”
In a similar vein, a commenter on one of the blogs I read grumbled that George Bush has turned out to be a “tax and spend liberal.”
Has Bush has strayed away from true conservativism? Greenhut to the contrary, I’d say no. He has:
•Created an office specifically to give money to religious groups.
•Promoted an extensive campaign of tax cuts targeting the highest income levels (I’ve always thought it would make more sense to start cutting with the lowest-income levels that pay taxes, then move to the next rung on the economic ladder, so that by the time the super-rich get to cut anything, the lower classes have had their income taxes wiped out).
•An active, interventionist foreign policy which regards anyone who isn’t pro-American as pro-terrorist/pro-radical Islam, and assumes no extremes are excessive in the war on terror. Substitute “Communism” and you’d have the same policy many conservatives (not all, I concede) embraced during the Cold War.
•Opposition to gay marriage.
•Opposition to any sort of environmental regulation.
•An apparent belief that “government is the problem,” as so many conservatives put it, thus justifying massive privatization to corporate America, even when the results are disastrous (Walter Reed) and the savings debatable (I wonder if this doesn’t explain appointing incompetents such as Michael Brown to high-level posts: If government can’t do anything good, it doesn’t matter if someone with no qualifications has the job).
•Massive military build-up.
•And like conservative icon Ronald Reagan before him, Bush is running up monumental budget deficits. In theory, as Greenhut and that one commenter note, that’s very anticonservative, but it’s conservative practice, for sure.
By no stretch of logic is Bush not a conservative.
The blogger Digby predicted this a couple of years ago: As Bush’s poll ratings began to tank, she said conservatives would increasingly start denouncing him as Not One Of Them. Kudos to Digby for a good call.
