Fleeing The Bush Bandwagon

   It would seem that even some of President Bush's former die-hard backers are now having a realization that Bush is indeed a certified idiot and an incompetent to top it all off.

   Daily Kos

Trying to unload Bush

by kos  Tue Mar 27, 2007

Bob Novak is the latest Republican to try and excise the Bush disaster from the Republican Party.

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment [...]

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?".

The problem, of course, is that they never claimed they were the party of better management. They claimed they were the party that hated government, the one that would shrink it small enough that it could then be drowned in a bathtub.

Republicans are in a bind -- they want to disown Bush and throw him to the wolves. They want to blame him for all the problems they've had the past few years governing the country and save their own hides, but they still can't find the strength to oppose his Iraq efforts. They are attached to his hip, yet they want to pretend that Bush is the cause of all the nation's problems. Complicating things, they've had a governmental trifecta, so they don't have their usual Democratic Party foils to blame. They're on their own and isolated on this one.

But ultimately, Bush is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. The cause is conservatism. How can an ideology that holds as a truism that government can't work, work? If Republicans ran the country smoothly and ably, it would lay waste to their claims that government is the enemy and can't make people's lives better. In that regards, Bush hasn't been incompetent. He's been wildly successful.

So yes, what we have just witnessed is the logical conclusion of effective conservative governance, and things would look the same way today whether we had President McCain, President Lott, President Jeb, President Romney, President Thompson, or whichever other anti-government Republican we slotted in.

This is what conservatives want for America. We're seeing it in the most vivid of colors. Blaming Bush for doing exactly what conservatives wanted to the country would be like, well, blaming Gonzales for doing exactly what Bush ordered him to do.

 

Tags: Republicans George Bush Alberto Gonzales Congress conservative