The True Conservative President

George Bush gets roundly attacked from within his party for abandoning true conservative principles. Some even argue that he's no Replublican at all. An interesting article in today's New York Times by Rutgers history professor David Greenberg claims that Bush is, if anything, the ultimate Republican conservative and that's what truly has his fellow party leaders worried:

"...Before Reagan, the so-called conservative movement had been an insurgent force within the Republican party. But starting in the 1980s, most of the liberals in the party left it, and for the last 10 or 20 years, the party and the movement have been more or less congruent. From 2002 to 2007, moreover, the G.O.P. controlled not just the White House but both houses of Congress, the federal judiciary and a majority of state governments, as well as more media outlets than ever before. They were thus able to impose a conservative agenda with little resistance.

"Indeed, so few were the obstacles that conservatism was able to run amok. The result — in the assessment of not just liberals but also other observers — has been disaster: a mess of a war, the failure to plan for Hurricane Katrina, the erosion of the church-state wall, widening inequality, the loss of civil liberties including habeas corpus, and scores of other ills that readers of this column can list as easily as I. This was the fruit of modern American conservatism.

"But now Republicans are deserting Bush. Businessmen and evangelicals, libertarians and social moderates are all astir. The reason isn’t that Bush failed to espouse their causes any more than Reagan did. From the Iraq War on down, after all, his policies have also been their policies — backed by their legislators, upheld by their judges, championed by their journalists.

"No, the reason so many are complaining about Bush or today’s G.O.P. is that their policies haven’t worked out very well. Since the 2004 election, majorities of Americans have turned against them. What conservatives like Chuck Hagel and Bush’s other right-wing detractors fear in their bones — and not without reason — is that majorities of Americans will soon also turn against the creed of conservatism itself."

It may be time for Harpo to take another look at those bones and entrails.