Even conservatives are wondering: Is Bush a conservative at all?
thenation.com
Hungry for hard-hitting criticism of the Iraq war? You're as likely to find it these days in publications like The National Interest, a conservative foreign affairs quarterly, and the recently launched American Conservative as in publications on the left. Want a rundown on the billions in government subsidies that the Bush Administration has lavished on corporations even as it claims to champion laissez-faire economics? Look no further than the website of the libertarian Cato Institute, which bristles with such information. How about sober analyses of the multibillion-dollar budget deficits the Administration has overseen? There's no better source than the staid, conservative business press.
National Review, which enthusiastically supported the Iraq war, recently published an editorial, "An End to Illusion," that criticized the Bush Administration for its "underestimation...of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil." It's a view that conservative columnist George Will has also voiced. "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts," wrote Will in a scathing recent column on Iraq.
[Clyde] Prestowitz, author of the recent book Rogue Nation, [says]… “Today's neocons are not conservatives, but "right-wing Trotskyists" who are every bit as determined as their counterparts on the left once were about revolutionizing the world.
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The problem for the neocons is that many conservatives realize that imperialist ventures don't come cheap; implanting "freedom and democracy" on foreign soil requires just the sort of "big government" they are supposed to be against. As Leon Hadar of Cato observes, "A conservative administration is now suggesting that all you need is, yes, government--a few days and nights of aerial bombing, 140,000 US troops, bureaucrats with good intentions and economic aid from Washington--and, voilà! we have 'nation building.'"
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Recall how, a decade ago, Newt Gingrich and Republican members of the 104th Congress pledged, in the Contract With America, to pass a series of bills that would restore citizens' faith in their leaders. Topping the list was "The Fiscal Responsibility Act: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress."
By 2003, the party that spent the Clinton years singing this tune had turned a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion into a projected deficit of $4 trillion--in two years. As the London Financial Times observed after Bush's second round of tax cuts was passed, this was not conservatism but madness. "On the management of fiscal policy, the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum," the paper commented. "Reason cuts no ice; economic theory is dismissed; and contrary evidence is ignored. But watching the world's economic superpower slowly destroy perhaps the world's most enviable fiscal position is something to behold."
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"This Administration has not been for small government at all," says Veronique de Rugy, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's a big spending administration. Just look at the farm bill, which is pure corporate welfare. Bush's farm bill actually moved against the one signed by Clinton [in 1996], which at least tried to cut down some of the subsidies. It goes against every market principle you can imagine."
Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute has described the Administration's energy plan in much the same way: "three parts corporate welfare and one part cynical politics...a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington."
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[John] McCain, whom the hard right views as a traitor to the movement, has proposed establishing a corporate welfare termination commission that would identify and eliminate tax breaks and subsidies handed out annually to the private sector. It's the sort of thing you would think an administration committed to the notion of laissez-faire economics (not to mention the virtue of self-reliance, preached incessantly to the poor) would rush to embrace, but of course, it hasn't.
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