I'm going to take a page from the Atrios playbook today and name a Wanker of the Day. Atrios gives this honor to the day's most asinine partisan or clueless pundit, and with that in mind, I hereby announce that today's wanker is . . . the envelope please . . .
Yes! John Dickerson of Slight . . . oops, I mean Slate.com, for today's post "Bush Critics You Should Trust." Why should you trust them? Because they're conservatives, silly, which means you can read them without getting liberal cooties:
[I]t's more interesting to consider the anti-Bush writings by Republicans, conservatives, and erstwhile Bush allies and employees. These folks have to have a certain amount of courage — heresy is always harder than joining — and they usually try to be intellectually honest, since the Bush presidency has forced them to grapple with their own belief systems.
If by "intellectually honest" you mean "opportunistic," then the term certainly applies to intellect-shills like Bruce Bartlett, whose new book Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy arraigns the president on a list of charges that were glaringly obvious barely a few months into his first term, but which somehow stirred Bartlett to fury only after the 2004 election was safely past and there was no chance of the complaints actually having an effect. Bartlett and his fellow apostates preferred to see another couple of thousand dead American soldiers in Iraq than risk the unthinkable — a Democratic president. Bartlett's faint, piping criticisms of Bush got him flushed from the right-wing think tank that employed him, but this is hardly a badge of honor. By aiming his bombshells at a lame-duck administration full of operators who will immediately run to private industry to begin cashing in on their connections, Bartlett is virtually guaranteed another sinecure — and unearned status as a lion of integrity to boot.
It's also curious to note that the themes Dickerson singles out among the conservative critics — Bush's incompetence, his fiscal irresponsibllity, his manipulation of shaky intelligence to gin up the Iraq war, his insistence on hearing only what he wants to hear — have for years been the foundation of liberal criticism of the Bush administration, but Dickerson only seems to hear them when they emerge from an elephant's trunk. He praises Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury Secretary who spilled the beans for Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty, while ignoring the inconvenient fact that liberals embraced the book as further support for their criticism even as those "intellectually honest" conservatives averted their eyes or went on the attack. I would suggest that this liberal support for O'Neill is the reason Dickerson singles O'Neill out for a pop-psychology personality profile: O'Neill, he tells us, is "cranky, and so persnickety at times that it makes you want to brain him." No other conservative gets such a personality assessment from Dickerson. That's because O'Neill, unlike Bartlett et al, has the cooties — those dreaded liberal cooties.
Article comments
1 - Larry A. Sakin
Excellent article Steven.
My, my, my, how did John Dickerson ever get past the gatekeepers of the so-called liberal media?
2 - Charles Jordan
I don't know who John Dickerson is, but the legislation President Bush signed into law (some of it with great fan-fair) speaks for itself: Leave no Child Behind; Campaign Finance Reform; the Medicare Perscription Drug Bill; his farm subsidy bill; tarrifs he placed on on steel and lumber; and don't forget the so-called guest worker program that he wants to make into law sometime in the near future.
Does it really matter what Dickerson thinks about Bartlett or what kind of press Barlett gets? Those are side issues.
Let's discuss legislative record of Bush and the GOP congress. That's what will tell us if he's a conservative or not. We don't have to listen to Barlett or Dickerson or whoever owns this blog.
The sad fact is Bush isn't a conservative and we been had.
3 - Dave Nalle
The amazing thing is how many people he fooled into thinking he was a conservative. Some of us have known what he really was for years.
Dave
4 - Steven Hart
I dunno, guys -- I seem to recall Grover Norquist, who last time I checked was a pretty conservative guy, saying "George W. Bush IS our agenda." Except for Pat Buchanan's magazine The American Conservative, the right-wing journals have been casting rose petals at King George II's feet for years now. It's only just recently, with his poll numbers in the toilet and a good portion of the Republican leadership about to be fitted for orange jumpsuits that we started hearing this talk about Dubya not being a "real" conservative.
Dubya not a "real" conservative? Didn't he give rich people the tax cuts they craved, so that now Paris Hilton can buy three of everything at each Versace show? Hasn't he thrown open the doors of government to corporate looters -- excuse me, "entrepreneurs"? Hasn't he stripped away regulatory protections for everyday Americans? True, he hasn't been able to destroy Social Security yet, but he's managed to make an ungodly mess of Medicare. He's done almost everything you conservatives ever wanted! You guys have the White House and Congress in your pockets, and a 24-hour a day television propaganda spigot at your disposal! Why so glum, chum?
The real problem facing you is that the disasters created by Bush's presidency are encoded in the very DNA of conservative rhetoric. Wasn't it Ronald the Great who told us, "Government isn't the solution to the problem -- it IS the problem"? So, if government is a scam and public service is a joke, where is the dishonor in packing government posts with cronies and lobbyists?
Reagan and Bush are the "Before and After" advertisement for American conservatism. Where Bush differs from Reagan, it is simply in the realm of competence. Reagan never let a major American city drown. And, to be fair, we'll have to wait for the end of the Bush administration to do a final tally and see if it matches the indictment record set by the Reagan team.
Your problem with Bush isn't that he'sot a real conservative. It's that he and Congress are a museum quality illiustration of the hollw shell that conservatism has become. You dance with the chimp that brought you, guys. Get comfortable with that fact. After all, you can't overcome your problemn unless you acknowledge that you have a problem.