Cause—>Effect 0

I’ve mentioned the copout before. When “conservatives” get power and their policies fail, the wingnut noise machine starts to say that “X (whoever it may happen to be) is not really a conservative.”

The problem with that rationale, of course, is that “X (whoever it happens to be)” is really a conservative. It’s the policies, not the politicians, which are failures.

Now, when I say “conservative,” I do not mean the conservatism of, say, Teddy Roosevelt, who actually believed in, gosh!, conserving things.

I mean the policies of those who, under the label of conserving, want to fundamentally undermine alter American society, the American economy, and, most of all, American freedoms. (Ironic, ain’t it, that those who most vocally claim that someone else hates our freedom are the first to violate the basic rights that the framers established in the Constitution of the United States of American?)

(I guess that’s why they call themselves “neo-conservatives,” to distinguish themselves from actual conservatives.)

Neo-Conservatism is founded in, well, air.

Air and wishful thinking. The wishful thinking that told us that Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and that Iraqis would welcome us as “liberators.” (I’m not even going to bother to cite sources for those quotations. They are too well known, it’s too late, and I’m too tired–but the link below was too powerful to let wait until tomorrow.)

And whenever it’s proponents get in power, they prove that through the failures of their policies.

Bush and his enablers are no exception.

Follow the link to read more:

The problem of course, is that Bush has upheld the principles of the (neo–ed.) conservative movement, and all of these so-called conservatives who are suddenly so disappointed in him had been cheering him on all along while he did all these things they supposedly didn’t like. And the thing is, they still haven’t repudiated the actual policies – just the outcome.

For example, none of these people are complaining about the fact that he lowered taxes in wartime, an unprecedented policy in all of history. They can complain all they like that he hasn’t been “fiscally conservative”, but they not only supported his war and his tax cuts, but they refused to so much as question the fact that he ran it in the most expensive way imaginable – not just pseudo-privatizing the functions of the armed services, but actually giving the private companies they outsourced to incentives to overspend and generally waste resources. (And they let him force them to pass the drug-benefit bill with a clause forbidding negotiations to keep prices down.)

Via Atrios.