Marble Composition

Jumping Ship: He's No Conservative

This line of thinking, that Bush's fiscal policies are somehow "liberal", needs to be shot down immediately. On cue, this is what we're going to see more and more of: rats scurrying off the deck of a sinking ship. Here, Josh Marshall takes down Wall Street Jounral columnist Peggy Noonan (a.k.a, the Dolphin Lady):

In yesterday's online WSJ Peggy Noonan asks readers whether they understood George W. Bush "to be a liberal in terms of spending" when he first came on the political scene in 2000.

I've been mulling over the last few days just how to characterize this: but it is certainly a muddled and bad-faith form of ideological projection mixed with evasion.

I think Atrios or Yglesias or perhaps both have made this point recently: but liberals or Democrats aren't committed to high rates of government spending as a core principle in the way that conservatives are with tax cuts. Yes, they believe in more social spending as a general rule. And there are certainly cases when that's led to fiscal excess. The distinction is an important one -- and one conservatives have a difficult time facing. But, in any case, what President Bush has done over the last five years -- with the unfailing support of pretty much every Republican elected official and pundit -- isn't 'big spending.' It's intentionally reckless fiscal policy which is going to create havoc for the country's finances for years to come.

If a Democrat tried to send soldiers to war and forgot to buy them ammunition or passed a health care plan without enough money for necessary drugs, that wouldn't make him closet conservative. It would mean he was incompetent. And voters would hold him to account.

On the part of Noonan and others, this is just an attempt to unload on the other guys the disaster they've allowed to happen on their watch.

Noonan actually tries to argue that President Bush has been a big spender on social programs and that this is somehow tied to his 'compassionate conservatism.' But that claptrap won't survive first contact with the budget numbers. President Bush has trashed the country's finances with three things -- big tax cuts, big defense hikes and whatever pork is necessary to win the next election.

Mr. Bush's mammoth deficit spending isn't some weird sort of ideological inversion. It's a character problem -- like spending money you don't have always is. And it's one Noonan and her ideological fellow-travellers are utterly on the line for.

Can anyone provide us with any example of any enterprise that this man, our president, has not run completely into the ground? And for the sake of clarity, can we please exclude the ones that his father's buddies didn't bail him out of? Thanks. Moving on, this is from Zach Roth at the Washington Monthly:

RE-WRITING HISTORY: I couldn't help noticing something about one of Bush's responses at his press conference this morning. Asked about FEMA trailers that were left sitting unused in Arkansas after Katrina, he said:

"The taxpayers aren't interested in 11,000 trailers just sitting there. Do something with them," Bush said. "And so I share that sense of frustration when a big government is unable to, you know — it sends wrong signals to taxpayers."

So it's not that the White House was incompetent and uninterested. It's that the government's too big. That's the problem.

The White House has decided, it seems, that the only way to salvage anything from this whole Katrina mess is to use it as a way to further discredit the idea that government can provide people with anything of value. As if any "big government" would have screwed up as badly as Bush's did. We've seen this tactic used before, of course, but Bush's famous rhetorical clumsiness makes it particularly unsubtle here.

In a funny way, it's the same thing that Bush's new conservative critics — Bruce Bartlett, Andrew Sullivan, et al. — are doing by focusing on the growth of spending under Bush. It's not conservatism that's the problem, they're saying. It's that Bush isn't really a conservative at all, he's a big-spending liberal.

Many people smarter than me have pointed out how stupid this is. Sure, Bush has frequently departed from pure conservative ideology, but what that suggests is that he's an unprincipled, Nixon-style political operator, interested principally in maximizing his own power. It doesn't make him a liberal.

This is important in the long-term, because if the lesson of the Bush years becomes that Bush failed because he didn't hew closely enough to core conservative principles, I shudder to think about what the next Republican president's going to do.

The argument that Bush is some kind of liberal spender will not stand because it's devoid of feet and legs. If this man's policies can't stand the conservative test, to reiterate Zach's statement, that in no way makes them liberal. They're his policies; he owns them now and forever. And, after five years of unending support, for the so-called principled conservative thinkers of the day to abondan the president now is beyond disingenuous. It's stupid, lazy, bullshit.

P.S. One other thing I noticed about Zach's post, which may have been inadvertant, was this:

...he's an unprincipled, Nixon-style political operator, interested principally in maximizing his own power.

And that's all he is. It's really all he's ever been. He's nothing more than a hatchet man on an endless campaign, and whether American or foreign, his enemies are defined by their loyalty; you're with him, or against him.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 3/21/2006 10:08:00 PM