Captain Conservative

It's hard out there for a Shrub

Posting has been slow today, in part because I'm at home feeling less than a hundred percent. Nothing serious: I had a great time yesterday at JazzFest, and even maintained an astonishing degree of sobriety, considering the location...but I was driving, and at least ONE person behind the wheel should be sober in transit between NOLA and Red Stick...

But I was still a tad stiff and sore, both from the fest and the usual...and there are plenty of chores to catch up on. Damn--you take a weekend off and things really come back to bite...

I've also been a little slow because I've been absorbing a couple of long, but good essays from Glenn Greenwald and Hunter at Daily Kos...and, with Krugman's latest once again hitting the nail on the head, they make for an interesting afternoon of reading.

Krugman:

Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of Bush critics; "It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again," said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr. Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates have tended to dismiss the administration's harsh critics as victims of irrational Bush hatred.

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth. They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left — which do exist, but are supported only by a tiny fringe — the crazy conspiracy theories of the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians, television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong. When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won't blame those who led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.

Hunter:

This Bush, however, is if anything not quite sufficiently interested in the actual tasks of government to be aware of where the failures of his own policies lie, and we have therefore been able to have a rather more spectacular demonstration of Conservatism, Unbound. He is uninterested in critique or analysis, and therefore intentionally ignorant of anything but the glowing conservative rightness of his wisdom: his conservatism is pure and unadulterated by pesky details such as economic figures or on-the-ground results. The results are uncut neoconservative foreign policy, (a now-proven fiasco), religious conservatism as overt as possible (without utterly fracturing his own coalition and causing many to doubt his sanity) and a conservative fiscal policy that burps out, with I will point out again full conservative House and Senate encouragement and one-upsmanship, deficit spending so absurdly and obviously buffoonish as to be worth nothing short of full mockery even by those coming up with the plans.

In that conservatism would appear, at this point, to be nothing but kleptocracy of the upper class coupled to whatever faux issue can be dreamed up to provide the rallying cry for the "base", I'm not sure in what aspect Bush is not the full and complete embodiment of the movement.

He does what his unapologetically and impeccably conservative advisors tell him, can we all agree on that point? And can we all agree, furthermore, that these economic, social and foreign policy advisors are all as conservative as a president could possibly manage to intentionally achieve, short of gunpoint purges? So if the advisors are unabashedly conservative, and the think-tank generated policies are from long-term conservative sources, and the Congress is controlled by conservatives, exactly where is this notion coming from that the failures of that entire collection is somehow outside the responsibilities or explicit actions of the conservative policymakers involved?

Bush's foreign policy, especially, is founded on several unapologetic cornerstones of the conservative movement: fear and dismissal of the international community, fear and dismissal of international law and treaty, and the dedicated notion that United States military power can act as forceable agent of spreading pro-American interests. Neoconservatism takes that further, to the premise that United States military power can and should in fact reshape anti-American regions into pro-American regions, through mere expenditure of bullets: it is a profoundly Stupid premise, but it rooted quite firmly only in conservative notions of international "policy".

Similarly, the corporatist premise that private industry must be removed from government intrusiveness is another critical cornerstone of the conservatism -- and is being followed, enthusiastically, by the Bush administration. Divesting government responsibilities into the hands of for-profit business, also conservative to the core. Not just "sortof" conservative, but fundamentally and unambiguously a central conservative tenet. Reducing tax burdens of the wealthy, on the oligarchic and Randian notion that the piteous blokes have enough to worry about what with the full weight of industry on their shoulders, and really can't be expected to contribute personally to the government whose very laws and infrastructure made that wealth possible -- please. You couldn't get more "conservative" than that if you shoved Reagan, Noonan, Gingrich, Buckley and Hume into a sausage making machine and fed the results to George Will during a Yankees game.

There's nothing here that's not "conservative". Calling the natural and obvious outcome of those choices as being, whoops, not what we meant is, in the case of Goldberg, Noonan, and others, tawdry and roundly dishonest.

You puts your money in; you gets your prize back out.

Greenwald:

It is true that Bush is unquestionably not a small-government conservative -- not in any way -- but he is even further away, much further away, from anything resembling "liberalism." His expansions of federal power are devoted to goals which are wholly alien and repugnant to political liberalism, and many of the expanded powers are neither conservative nor liberal because they are simply contrary to the basic principles of American government and well outside of the range our most basic political values.

Ultimately, Bush's ideological purity matters little. It is conservatives whose support twice put him in office, who vigorously supported him for virtually his entire presidency, who never objected to his being described and self-labeled as "conservative," and who -- with rare exception -- repeatedly claimed him as one of their own. I understand the desire to re-cast Bush as a "liberal"; he's now akin to a live grenade frantically being tossed around because nobody wants to be stuck with him in history.

But for conservatives, this effort is futile. Bush is indelibly branded in the public mind as a conservative, largely because of the unyielding support given to him by most conservatives. For that reason, his failure will almost certainly be viewed as a failure of conservatism, despite the last-minute and rather unprincipled effort by conservatives to engage in an emergency re-labeling campaign.

I think Greenwald's last paragraph here really hits on something that this debate has ignored: whether or not Shrub is ideologically conservative matters less than public attitude, which associates Shrub and the GOP with the "conservative" label regardless of how they actually govern.

And let's not forget the role of yer "liberal" media: working hard ("it's hard work") to keep the public in line, or at least convince us of various myths, like the validity/legitimacy of the war in Iraq, or, closer to home, the problems in Louisiana after the deluge being the result of inept local officials who failed to timely commandeer buses.

Well, to paraphrase John Murtha, the public is once again way ahead--so far ahead that the GOP, their media syncophants, and assorted petit pundit attempts to "redefine" the conservative movement are likely to fall as flat as the land surrounding Midland, Texas. Which is why, for the next two years, Shrub should be tied to the GOP like the proverbial chicken around a dog's neck. GOP--he's YOURS, now and forever.

I'll give the GOP small credit: they destroyed the political label "liberal" by any and all means necessary, and did so without shamelessly and without regret...the fact that "liberalism" happened, among other things, to at least rid us of statutory segregation, create Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pass the original GI bill, etc. etc. etc. didn't matter to them AT ALL.

Well, thanks to Shrub's incompetence--incompetence to such an extent that catching a big ol' fish is HIS idea of his greatest accomplishment--those of us not enamored of what amounts to old-fashioned elitism in the guise of "Christian" principle have a chance...and I think we should be merciless: whether you call him a dead chicken(hawk) or lame duck, it's essential that the modern GOP be labeled as George W. Bush's legacy. And, if we're lucky the "live hand grenade," when it blows up, will merely cause political damage.

Because, unfortunately, Shrub's method of governance is leaving ALL of us vulnerable to much worse.