Lean Left

The Rats Are Leaving Bush’s Shipwreck

by KTK

March 13th, 2006

There’s an astounding shift taking place in the US right wing just now. It has developed over a matter of just weeks, and appears to be building. Conservatives have finally shaken off their Kool-Aid-induced stupor and awakened to two unmistakable facts: Bush is untrustworthy, stupid, and incompetent, and he’s also not really a conservative in any normal sense. As his Presidency tanks ever further, they’re stepping on each other to put daylight between themselves and the miserable failure to which they had blindly hitched their wagons for 5 excruciating years.

The large-scale shift has been growing: Francis Fukuyama, Prophet of Nada, after abandoning his end-of-history prediction (”Oops! Looks like we’ve got some more history coming up!”), has now abandoned his we-are-the-world prediction (”Everybody wants to be Americans.” “Oops! Everybody wants to kill Americans. That’s what I meant!”). (Fascinatingly, he has not yet abandoned any of the predictions that lead him to his right-wing conclusions as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, but we can confidently expect him to do so as soon as it’s too late, as usual.) William F. Buckley, of all people, has cast Bush out of the conservative movement and declared that his Iraq policy “did not work”. McCain blows hot and cold, as always, but he’s been more outspokenly critical since the New Year than at any time since the 2000 election. Increasing numbers of Republican Congressmembers are now openly talking about impeachment; Feingold has offered “censure” as the compromise position. (Where have we heard this before?) And the Teflon shield is finally cracking: Cheney, who got no criticism whatsoever for openly bribing a sitting member of the Supreme Court with a VIPs-only hunting trip two years ago while his case was being heard by that same Court, seemed stunned at being universally condemned after shooting a man on another hunting trip just recently and then obstructing justice when the police attempted to investigate; Bush has taken to zooming around the world without advance notice, trying desperately to find a setting in which he can look presidential, and being mocked even in friendly countries as he commits gaffe after gaffe; Tony Blair has all but abandoned his former lapdog obsequiousness and is openly trying to shed Bush like a mangy fur coat.

But more pointed criticisms are starting to roll in, and not just over the debacle in Iraq. Bruce Bartlett is a low-tax conservative who excoriates Bush for busting the budget:

AS A LIFELONG conservative, I have to be honest: George W. Bush is not one of us and has never been. There can be no denying that he has enacted policies contrary to conservative principles on far too many occasions.

In my view, his greatest failing has been a total lack of control over federal spending — to the point where liberal Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration is looking more and more like the “good old days.”

Let me break in here to note that the Clinon years were “the good old days”, from a budgetary perspective. He produced the first budget surplus since 1969, the first two-year consecutive surpluses since 1957, and the first three-year consecutive surpluses since 1949 (all in 1998-2000), and reduced the national debt 94%, from $5.7 trillion in 1992 to $360 billion in 2000. He produced the first balanced budget that did not rely on confiscating Medicare surpluses ever in the history of Medicare (and, thanks to George Bush, still the only budget ever that did not steal from Medicare). G.H.W. Bush increased the budget deficit every year of his presidency, to the then-all-time record of $290 billion which Clinton inherited in 1992; Clinton reduced the Bush deficit significantly every year of his presidency; in 2000 he enacted a budget with a $211 billion surplus. Within 2 years, George W. Bush had turned that into yet another Bush deficit, which has now reached well over $400 billion; it goes without saying that that is the worst fiscal management performance in the history of the world, considered in absolute dollars (though apparently Ronald Reagan did even worse as a percentage of GDP). Bush is also the first president in modern history to preside over a continuous net loss of jobs during his entire term in office.

I am not a “deficit hawk”, but if that is your yardstick for measuring financial performance, there’s no question of appearances - “fhe first MBA President” George W. Bush is in demonstrable fact the worst fiscal manager in the history of the Oval Office, and in fact the entire world. But I digress . . .

According to the Office of Management and Budget, overall spending has increased from 18.4% of the gross domestic product in 2000 to 20.8% this year, an increase of 2.4%. Clinton, by contrast, reduced spending from 22.1% of GDP to 18.4% during his two terms, a reduction of 3.7%. . . .

[D]omestic discretionary spending has also risen. Education spending, for example, is up 137%, according to Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and spending on community and regional development is up 342%. . . .

The number of identifiable pork-barrel projects that benefit particular states and congressional districts has risen from 958 in 1996 to 13,999 in 2005 . . . .

Bush’s greatest sin, in my book, was ramming the Medicare drug benefit through Congress by covering up its true cost and strong-arming principled conservatives into voting for it. . . .

I and a growing number of other budget analysts now think the only way of avoiding a financial Katrina when the baby boom generation starts to retire is a massive tax increase. Future presidents may be the ones to enact it. But Bush’s policies will have caused it.

Note this is a truly conservative analysis: only conservatives regard education and community development as, in Bartlett’s words, “wasteful”. But note also that almost all of this occurred with complete GOP control of the entire governmental apparatus, acting in slavish concert with Bush’s whims. Those extra 13,000 “earmarks” are nothing more than Republicans giving themselves and their friends money that the government doesn’t have, to the point that even conservative Republicans can’t hold their noses any more.

But those are just facts and figures. Jeffrey Hart, billed as “a former speechwriter for presidents Reagan and Nixon and, most recently, the author of The Making of the American Conservative“, rips Bush a new one on general prinicples:

Ideology is the enemy of conservatism because it edits, omits or ignores reality. George W. Bush is an ideologue.

Iraq is commonly said to be the centerpiece of Bush’s presidency. The United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But nearly three years after the invasion, no such weapons have been found. And evidence is mounting that the intelligence used to bolster the claims for Iraq’s WMD was cherry-picked, politically pressured and, to use intelligence expert Thomas Powers’ word, “fabricated.” . . .

Iraq is not going to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East but, assuming a civil war is avoided, probably a Shiite-dominated theocracy leaning toward Iran. For this, the bill will be half a trillion dollars and tens of thousands dead and wounded.

Ideology.

. . . The Bush centerpiece has been an astonishing flop.

A major triumph of American conservatism since World War II has been general acceptance of free-market economics in political discourse. . . .

Yet free-market economics pushed to exclude other worthy goals becomes an ideology.

Consider conservation. Since Republican Theodore Roosevelt created our national parks, every president has worked to protect them. Free-market ideologue Bush neglects them except as a playground for more snowmobiles. He wants to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He talks about fuel-efficient cars but does nothing to encourage their production.

Bush is a privatization ideologue. Not surprisingly, his scheme to privatize Social Security sank like a stone. Who wanted to attach the social safety net to stock in such companies as Enron and WorldCom? And Bush’s Medicare prescription drug plan, another privatization scheme, has been a disaster.

As for me, I’m in favor of treating disease and avoiding unnecessary death.

Stem cell research promises to do that. But not long after his inauguration in 2001, Bush greatly hampered stem cell research by severely limiting federal support for it. Why?

Ideology.

Bush puts it this way: “It’s wrong to destroy life in order to save life.”

That works only if you think a dozen cells is the equivalent of an infant diagnosed with diabetes or an adult with Parkinson’s disease. If you believe that, you will believe anything. In actuality, the supposed “culture of life” is a culture of disease and death.

Bush would like to abolish abortion. No one likes abortion. But a demand for it exists today that did not exist in 1950, let alone in 1920, when U.S. women got the vote. Today, look at a university campus. Half women. They are represented in all professions. They demand the right to decide if and when to have children. Criminalizing abortion would be folly, a disaster — and would fail, like that other prohibition. That’s the actuality.

Bush is not a conservative. He has bushwhacked the term. He is a right-wing ideologue.

Let me pause again to note how remarkable a piece this is: a truly committed ideological conservative tears into Bush for being purely ideological. He says: “free-market economics pushed to exclude other worthy goals becomes an ideology“; healthcare privatization “has been a disaster. As for me, I’m in favor of treating disease and avoiding unnecessary death. “; “if you think a dozen cells is the equivalent of an infant diagnosed with diabetes or an adult with Parkinson’s disease . . .you will believe anything“; “in actuality, the supposed “culture of life” is a culture of disease and death“‘; “criminalizing abortion would be folly, a disaster — and would fail“. He notes that abortion is related to women’s right to independence and autonomy, and notes approvingly that women “demand the right to decide if and when to have children.” These are hardly shocking insights - progressives know all of them almost from birth - but when the merely-offensive right wing finally recognizes what the truly-crazy right wing is up to is a good day indeed.

As the undertow from Bush’s sinking ship pulls down those around him (and vice versa - Bush is now having to distance himself from his own former aides, who are being indicted right and left almost faster than you can count them), long-time right-wingers are attempting to recapture the term “conservative” and exclude the nutters, the God squad, and the “movement conservative” berserkers for whom deliberately destroying the government is considered a mere tactic. This is disingenuous on their part - a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan accusing George Bush of being an ideologue is rather ironic - but it’s a good first step. Let’s never forget that those “moderate conservatives” are the ones who voted for the busted budgets, the destruction of Medicare, the fraudulent war and its too-real deaths, the restrictions on medical research, medical-treatment rights, and science-based policy in all its forms, and the rest of the Bush Kool-Aid-flavored disasters. The Bush War, the Bush Deaths, the Bush Tortures, the Bush Deficit, the Bush Medicare Collapse, Bartlett’s predicted Bush Tax Hikes, and all the other debacles did not come from nowhere - they came from GOP majorities in both houses of Congress and a majority of state legislatures, and from the hordes of GOP voters who didn’t let a little craziness scare them until long after the handwriting was on the wall. But it’s delicious to see progressive truths finally dawning on conservative dim-bulbs who didn’t care who they went home with until the morning after a very long dark night, and are now rightly ashamed of themselves.

Categories: Culture, Economics, Education, Environment, General, Health, Iraq, Politics |