Conservatives Call Bush a Socialist
Good call Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan:
If the ancient political wisdom is correct that a charge unanswered is a charge agreed to, the Bush White House pleaded guilty yesterday at the Cato Institute to some extraordinary allegations.
“We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come,” explained David Boaz, the think tank’s executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. “We didn’t get that.”
Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation?
Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” Bartlett called the administration “unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “vindictive” and “inept.”
It might also have had something to do with speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Author of the forthcoming “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back,” Sullivan called Bush “reckless” and “a socialist,” and accused him of betraying “almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for.”
Nor was moderator Boaz a voice of moderation. He blamed Bush for “a 48 percent increase in spending in just six years,” a “federalization of public schools” and “the biggest entitlement since LBJ.”
One can only hope the abandonment of Bush hastens.
March 11th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Well, it makes sense if you understand the diversity of the Conservative ideology. He’s certainly not a Libertarian, unlike the Cato institute and Boaz. I’m not sure if his economic policy is more Neocon or Paleocon, and I’m not sure who Bartlett is but if he’s a former Reagan aide at a Cato event, he’s likely libertarian.
Spending under the Bush administration has risen dramatically (Clinton also, but Clinton obviously wouldn’t be a libertarian). That’s their point.
March 12th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Where is my earlier comment?
From Daniel Drezner — http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002627.html
The Los Angeles Times on the conservative crackup
The Sunday Current section of the Los Angeles Times has three articles on how George W. Bush has betrayed conservatism.
Jeffrey Hart writes how Bush is too much of an ideologue to be a conservative in the Burkean sense.
Bruce Bartlett writes how Bush is too much of a spendthrift to be a conservative in the fiscal sense
And your truly writes how Bush has been too inconsistent and too incompetent to be a conservative in the foreign policy sense:
[D]octrinal disputes aside, Republicans like me are angry at Bush because he has frittered away one of the party’s greatest assets � the belief that when it came to international relations, the GOP was the party of competence. Between 1965 and 2000, analysts gave Republican presidents better grades than Democrats in managing American foreign policy.
The latest public opinion polls, however, give congressional Democrats a new edge on national security issues. Which is not surprising given the administration’s failures at matters that should be routine � interagency cooperation, contingency planning, congressional consultations, alliance management and so on.
In the eyes of his party, Bush’s biggest foreign policy sin is not his aims, or even his means. It’s that he has done the improbable � he’s made the Democrats look like a credible alternative.
Enjoy your conservative crackup!!
March 13th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Your earlier comment posted, I just hold all comments for approval to stop all the debt consolidation and beastiality ads from getting through.
Spending increased dramatically under Clinton? Maybe initially, but as far as I’m aware there was a pretty good decrease overall. Not just “slowing the rate of growth” but outright cuts. I heard that Clinton was the first president since before Roosevelt that left a smaller government than the one he inherited.
March 14th, 2006 at 9:08 am
I don’t think that is true about Clinton. Can you cite it? If it is true, I certainly would like to know that and would retract my previous statements. However, that does not sound reasonable. Clinton, like every other president before him - Dem and Republican - left a bigger government behind.
March 16th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Ok, not outright reduction, but vs. the GDP it shrank. Even so, the number of federal employees shrank in absolute terms, from Slate:
Under eight years of Big Government Bill Clinton, to choose another president at random, the federal civilian work force went down from 2.9 million to 2.68 million. Federal spending grew by 11 percent in real terms—less than half as much as under Reagan. As a share of GDP, federal spending shrank from 21.5 percent to 18.3 percent—more than double Reagan’s reduction, ending up with a federal government share of the economy about a tenth smaller than Reagan left behind.
http://www.slate.com/id/100474/