Rep. Party is party of Bush, except if their jobs at risk

While troops died, Republicans continued to support Bush and only turned against him when their own jobs were threatened. Scumbags all for their self interest while people died.---BBB

Glenn Greenwald - Salon
Wednesday June 6, 2007 11:44 EST
The Republican Party is the party of Bush

In his Washington Post column yesterday, Howard Kurtz (link fixed) wrote about my Monday post, which documented the reams of "conservatives" who glorified and slavishly devoted themselves to George Bush for the last six years when he was popular, only now to pretend that he was not really one of them all along. Kurtz asked the following questions:

Let's say you support someone running for the White House, you support him as president, you roundly criticize your ideological opponents for taking potshots at your man and not recognizing his greatness.

Then, you have to admit, he screws up. He makes mistakes. He fails to live up to your high hopes and parts company with you on key issues. You feel betrayed. If you're intellectually honest and not just a partisan water-carrier, you level with your readers or viewers.

But questions arise: Why did it take six years for you to figure this out? Do you owe an apology to those you castigated for making the kind of criticism that you are now echoing? Or do you simply try to airbrush the past?

Kurtz describes the dilemma far more generously than is warranted, but the basic questions he poses are still the right ones. And it's good to see Kurtz recognizing this reality.

It is vital to emphasize repeatedly that the havoc wreaked on this country by George W. Bush is, first and foremost, the work of America's so-called "conservative" movement, which venerated Bush to a degree unseen in the modern presidential era. Here was not a mere President, but "our" Commander-in-Chief during a Time of War, and to criticize him was to criticize America. There were multiple culprits-in-arms along the way -- principally the news media -- but the right-wing movement now seeking to re-invent itself as dissatisfied victims of the Bush presidency in search of a "Real Conservative" to lead it are the ones who bear full responsibility for the devastation this presidency has wreaked on the country.

Along those lines, Andrew Sullivan points out in response to my post that there were conservatives who vehemently objected to the Bush presidency, and cites Bruce Bartlett and his own 2004 support for John Kerry. It is true that there were a tiny number of conservatives who protested the endless radicalism, lawlessness, and excesses of the Bush presidency, and I said exactly that in my post:

What is most glaringly apparent from this entire spectacle is that outside of a handful of honest conservatives too small to merit much discussion [the ones who objected to Bush early on as a radical rather than a "conservative" (and were viciously attacked as heretics, non-conservatives, even liberals)], the right-wing "conservative movement" -- which eagerly ignored its own "principles" when Bush was popular and re-discovered them only when it needed to repudiate him -- has conclusively demonstrated that its only real "principle" is its own political power.
But the bolded part there is, in my view, the critical one. When I first began blogging, I wrote frequently about the handful of conservatives who were vigorously arguing that Bush's lawlessness and extremism were intolerable regardless of political ideology and that it contravened the allegedly defining conservative "principles" -- the Bruce Feins, Bob Barrs, even George Wills. I even devoted a substantial bulk of a chapter in How Would a Patriot Act? to those conservatives, in order to demonstrate that objections to Bush's radical executive power theories and outright lawbreaking were compelled not by a belief in liberal or conservative political ideology, but by a belief in the most fundamental and defining American political principles, really just by a basic belief in the rule of law.

And beyond that, I've written several times for The American Conservative, home to some of the most forceful and persuasive opponents of the War in Iraq from the beginning. There was a time when I, at least, expected far more conservatives to object meaningfully to the endless series of decisions which so plainly contravened the storied, theoretical "conservative principles," yet it never happened -- until Bush's popularity collapsed and his presidency widely viewed as a failure of historic proportions.

One cannot say -- and I never have said -- that there are no conservatives who dissented from the Bush worldview, but their numbers are so tiny as to be irrelevant. That is because this movement's belief in its ostensible political principles is plainly illusory, just a crass political prop. And they simply do not believe in the basic constitutional values which have defined the country since its inception, nor do they believe in the rule of law (hence the virtual consensus that convicted felon Lewis Libby should be pardoned). What else do they need to embrace in order to eliminate all doubts about that?

It is worth recalling how common it is -- especially in recent times -- for a political movement to mount primary challenges to sitting Presidents when that movement believes the President has strayed from the movement's defining ideology. Liberals were dissatisfied with Jimmy Carter, believing he did not embody liberal principles, and thus backed Ted Kennedy's 1980 primary challenge. Many conservatives did the same in 1976 by backing Ronald Reagan over Gerald Ford, and again in 1992 by backing Pat Buchanan against George H.W. Bush.

But the idea of mounting a primary challenge to George W. Bush in 2004 never crossed the mind of any prominent conservatives, at least not publicly. The consensus among them was that he was one of them, a True Conservative, someone to be hailed and revered and built up -- and that consensus remained undisturbed until now, when political considerations compel them to pretend that they have been dissatisfied with Bush because he is something other than a "conservative." And with that behavior, this movement reveals itself to be as dishonest and free of principles as they are destructive.

The "Republican base" has become virtually monolithic and easily recognizable -- it is the swooning crowds cheering for torture and a doubling of Guantanamo, threatening war with Iran, urging still more surveillance and limitless government power in the name of the All-Consuming, All-Important Glorious War with the Scary, Dangerous, Never-Before-Seen Muslim Terrorists. Anyone who opposes that vision -- The Bush Vision -- is not considered to be a Republican at all, let alone a "conservative." Just ask the tax-opposing, spending-hating, small-government-advocating Ron Paul. Or Bruce Fein. Or Andrew Sullivan.

The Republican Party that gathered last night for their latest ritualistic displays of faux-"toughness" is, in every sense, the Party of George Bush (and it is worth comparing how desperately conservatives are fighting to distance themselves knowing how toxic is an association with that President, versus the desire of Democrats to align themselves with the still-popular Bill Clinton, a set of facts which are typically reversed completely by the press). To the extent conservatives had differences with Bush, those differences have been marginal (a Harriet Miers here and a Dubai Port deal there), virtually always premised on the theory that he was insufficiently extreme and uncompromising, and most of all, muted. One of the few things more dishonest than the administration itself is the conservative movement which built and sustained it and now wants to pretend that it didn't.