Bush is a Conservative

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now. But Avedon Carol actually did write it, and much better than I could have written it. Its really very, very good:

[S]ome conservatives have noticed that he [GW] hasn’t exactly upheld the alleged principles of conservatism.

The problem of course, is that Bush has upheld the principles of the conservative movement, and all of these so-called conservatives who are suddenly so disappointed in him had been cheering him on all along while he did all these things they supposedly didn’t like. And the thing is, they still haven’t repudiated the actual policies – just the outcome.

For example, none of these people are complaining about the fact that he lowered taxes in wartime, an unprecedented policy in all of history. They can complain all they like that he hasn’t been “fiscally conservative”, but they not only supported his war and his tax cuts, but they refused to so much as question the fact that he ran it in the most expensive way imaginable – not just pseudo-privatizing the functions of the armed services, but actually giving the private companies they outsourced to incentives to overspend and generally waste resources. (And they let him force them to pass the drug-benefit bill with a clause forbidding negotiations to keep prices down.)

…

And then they did things like spend amazing amounts of money to have schools tell kids not to have sex. Now, you can cancel all sex education, or you can have real sex education, but why on earth would you need to pay strangers to tell kids not to have sex when they can hear it for free from their own parents, just as we always have? Can you say, “Waste of money”? I thought you could. Did you hear conservatives say it? Rarely, if it all.

Bush has not been spending all that money alone – he had the help of the entire Republican leadership and almost every Republican in Congress, as well as the rest of the conservative base, who never raised a whisper against this behavior.

There’s a lot more good stuff there. Well worth a read.

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Update…

It occurs to me that I did had a post a while back looking back noting that GW and the Republican Congress had their way with policies, but aren’t happy about the outcomes. What they refuse to accept is that the policies, not just incompetence and random luck, have been largely to blame for these outcomes.