Salon: Blumenthal - Cons Rage On Bush to Hide Failure of their Ideology

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/10/20/bush_failures/index.html

No longer the "Right Man"
Conservatives are raging against Bush to hide the utter failure of their ideology.

By Sidney Blumenthal
salon.com

Oct. 20, 2005 | President Bush is the most conservative president in modern times. He consciously modeled himself as the opposite of his father's split political personality. Fiercely attacked as a betrayer, the elder Bush was partially defeated by a conservative revolt. In a classic case of reaction formation, George W. Bush was determined never to make an enemy on the right.

President Bush brought the neoconservatives, banished by Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., back into government, and followed their scenario to the letter for remaking the Middle East through an invasion of Iraq, using 9/11 as the pretext. He meticulously followed the right-wing script on supply-side economics, enacting an enormous tax cut for the wealthy that fostered a deficit that dwarfed Reagan's, the problem his father had tried to resolve through a tax increase that earned the right's hostility. And Bush has followed the religious right's line on stem cell research, abortion and creationism.

For his vision of the world as black and white, his disdain for internationalism and international law, his tainting of the domestic opposition as unpatriotic, his unapologetic tax breaks and loopholes for the upper brackets, and his religious zealotry, conservatives celebrated him. "The Right Man" was the title of a glowing hagiography by his former speechwriter, David Frum (also author of the Bush phrase "axis of evil," or at least "axis of ..."). "Bush's Greatness" was the headline of an article published in the neoconservative journal the Weekly Standard just before the 2004 election. Critics of Bush, it contended, were haters, and haters of Bush hated all "American conservatives and especially white, religious American conservatives."

For his second term, Bush took his narrow victory as a mandate to govern from the hard right. At last, he would begin the privatization of Social Security, rolling back the signature program of the New Deal. But he stumbled upon a dirty little secret of conservatism: Members of the public support conservative presidents so long as they leave the liberal programs that benefit them alone. The more Bush barnstormed the country to promote his Social Security scheme, the more the public became aware of it and opposed him. Baffled and confounded, he plowed ahead, even as the Iraq war eroded his support. Then Hurricane Katrina blew the top off his administration's culture of cronyism. Meanwhile, the special prosecutor investigating the disclosure of a covert CIA operative's identity by senior administration officials has moved steadily and silently like a submarine toward his targets.

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[ingac70]

1. Bush or no Bush, conservative ideology IS failure....

Who the hell but these @ssholes honestly want a repeat of the Gilded Age??

[Hissyspit]

2. Gilded Age looks great if you look back with Rose-Colored Glasses

and ignorance. And selfishness.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. What, you don't think the Titanic was a beautiful ship?

The Titanic was the perfect symbol of the Gilded Age. Rich, imposing, splendid looking, but shoddily built with rotten steel, and not enough lifeboats when it inevitably sank.

[Erika]

3. Bush has crashed the conservative movement

He's turned it into jello without molds. He continues to turn us into a third world banana country while outsourcing our wealth and jobs to globalists. He denies us health benefits while taking our money to supply Israel, Palestine, and Iraqis universal health care. He soccer punched the American worker and citizen and he simply doesn't care.

[WatchWhatISay]

4. Conservatives are raging against Bush to hide the utter failure of their

ideology.

Unfortunately the real point Blumenthal was trying to make isnt covered in these few paragraphs. The article runs out before we get to the good stuff.

I believe his point is one we should anticipate and be prepared for. Conservatives are now going to start seperating themselves from Bush, but they have to revise history and get their talking points out that all of this failure is due to the fact that Bush wasn't conservative enough. They not only want to seperate themselves from Bush but they also will desperately try to seperate Conservatism from Bush. Of course the only time he probably really didnt carry out their agenda is with the Miers nomination instead of some Ted Olson/Mitch McConnel/Priscilla Owens type (although I'm still not sure she is not a trojan horse).

That is what they did to his dad once he starte going down. Painted him as a near liberal.

We need to get our own talking points out there.

[Demeter]

6. Bush One's Failure Was Due To 8 Years of Reagan/Gingrich Crap

and 4 more years of his own destruction of America.