Conservative crack-up
The indictment that any true conservative could issue against Bush is manifold. Let's take a quick timeout to examine the bill of particulars, including as it does the following:
* He has endorsed altering his own proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to permit civil unions, a position now virtually identical to that of almost every Democratic presidential candidate this year – save for the reckless approach of tinkering with the Constitution to establish the marriage v. union distinction.
* He hasn't shown the guts to back a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and is curiously quiet about abortion, an issue he says the country "isn't ready" to address. (And here I thought this president leads from his heart, regardless of polls or popularity.)
* He first supported protectionism for the steel industry in 2001, angering steel purchasers, then flip-flopped on the tariffs issue in 2003, angering steel producers.
* He championed the extension of farm subsidies to the point where the federal government now doles out more money to agribusiness than the industry generates in tax receipts, making it a net-loss industry on welfare that's supported by the taxpaying public.
* He opposes the re-importation of prescription drugs made by U.S. pharmaceutical companies, a position that conflicts with the very free-market principles he pretends to espouse.
* He supported attempts by the Federal Communication Commission to consolidate the major media, a position that is both anti-competitive for the media markets as well as the marketplace of ideas broadcast by those media.
* His No Child Left Behind education-testing initiative epitomizes the sort of federal mandate that normally gags the "states' rights" crowd, a boondoggle for testing companies that does little more than force state administrators to learn what they already know – namely, which schools in their state are performing well, and which are not.
* His Medicare prescription program represents the largest expansion of the fastest-growing portion of the federal budget – so large, in fact, that the Administration had to lie to its Republican allies in Congress about the measure's actual cost estimates to get them to vote for it.
* He seriously underestimated the costs of the Iraq war, and the oil revenues that were supposed to pay for a reconstruction that our taxpayer dollars are instead subsidizing, forcing him to ask for an additional $25 billion in war funding beyond the $87 billion previously appropriated.
* As a collective result of several of these actions, this year Bush proposed the largest budget deficit in American history.
Now, try this fun little experiment, Mr. Keene: Imagine Al Gore were president right now, and had taken these positions and actions. You'd be writing a column about what a big-government, anti-market, fiscally-irresponsible, reckless, myopic, liberal socialist Gore is. And yet every one of these items is on Bush's resume.
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