View Full Version : Cato Forum Disses Dubya -- Conservatives Backlash?
As a fiscal conservative, I've been horrified by the current administration since day one. Nice to see the Cato institute stepping up to the plate (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701403.html) and calling a big-government deficit addict by name:
At Conservative Forum on Bush, Everybody's a Critic
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A02
If the ancient political wisdom is correct that a charge unanswered is a charge agreed to, the Bush White House pleaded guilty yesterday at the Cato Institute to some extraordinary allegations.
"We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come," explained David Boaz, the think tank's executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. "We didn't get that."
Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation?
Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," Bartlett called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."
It might also have had something to do with speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Author of the forthcoming "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back," Sullivan called Bush "reckless" and "a socialist," and accused him of betraying "almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for."
Nor was moderator Boaz a voice of moderation. He blamed Bush for "a 48 percent increase in spending in just six years," a "federalization of public schools" and "the biggest entitlement since LBJ."
True, the small-government libertarians represented by Cato have always been the odd men out of the Bush coalition. But the standing-room-only forum yesterday, where just a single questioner offered even a tepid defense of the president, underscored some deep disillusionment among conservatives over Bush's big-spending answer to Medicare and Hurricane Katrina, his vast claims of executive power, and his handling of postwar Iraq.
Bartlett, who lost his job at the free-market National Center for Policy Analysis because of his book, said that if conservatives were honest, more would join his complaint. "They're reticent to address the issues that I've raised for fear that they might have to agree with them," he told the group. "And a lot of Washington think tanks and groups of that sort, they know that this White House is very vindictive."
Waiting for the talk to start, some in the audience expressed their ambivalence.
"It's gonna hit the [bestseller] lists, I'm sure," said Cato's legal expert, Roger Pilon.
"Typical Bruce," replied John Taylor of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Admitted Pilon: "He's got a lot of material to work with."
Bartlett certainly thought so. He began by predicting a big tax increase "to finance the inevitable growth of government that is in the pipeline that President Bush is largely responsible for." He also said many fellow conservatives don't know about the "quite dreadful" traits of the administration, such as the absence of "anybody who does any serious analysis" on policy issues.
Boaz assured the audience that he told the White House that "if there's a rebuttal to what Bruce has said, please come and provide it."
Instead, Sullivan was on hand to second the critique. "This is a big-government agenda," he said. "It is fueled by a new ideology, the ideology of Christian fundamentalism." The bearded pundit offered his own indictment of Bush: "complete contempt" for democratic processes, torture of detainees, ignoring habeas corpus and a "vast expansion of the federal government." The notion, he said, that the "Thatcher-Reagan legacy that many of us grew up to love and support would end this way is an astonishing paradox and a great tragedy."
The question period gave the two a chance to come up with new insults.
"If Bush were running today against Bill Clinton, I'd vote for Clinton," Bartlett served.
"You have to understand the people in this administration have no principles," Sullivan volleyed. "Any principles that get in the way of the electoral map have to be dispensed with."
Boaz renewed his plea. "Any Bush economists hiding in the audience?"
There was, in fact, one Bush Treasury official on the attendance roster, but he did not surface. The only man who came close to defending Bush, environmental conservative Fred Singer, said he was "willing to overlook" the faults because of the president's Supreme Court nominations. Even Richard Walker, representing the think tank that fired Bartlett, declined to argue. "I agree with most of it," he said later.
Unchallenged, the Bartlett-Sullivan tag team continued. "The entire intellectual game has been given away by the Republican president," said Sullivan. "He's a socialist in so many respects, a Christian socialist."
Bartlett argued that Richard Nixon "is the model for everything Bush is doing."
Sullivan said Karl Rove's political strategy is "pathetic."
Bartlett said that "the administration lies about budget numbers."
"He is not a responsible human being; he is a phenomenally reckless human being," Sullivan proclaimed. "There is a level of recklessness involved that is beyond any ideology."
"Gosh," Boaz interjected. "I wish we had a senior White House aide up here."
Vladimir
03-08-2006, 21:37
Remember, he's a compassionate conservative. Whatever the hell that means. I guess if you're a liberal you think conservatives are a bunch of cold hearted monsters. Compassion in politics = money. How much you care depends on how much you spend.
Kanamori
03-08-2006, 22:01
Wow, some of those quotes at the end are pretty harsh. It sounds like he's being judged before God, or it sounds like King Charls's execution would have sounded like: "We find you guilty of committing treason against The Crown!"
Seamus Fermanagh
03-08-2006, 22:17
Not a bad analogy.
Lots of the conservative movement in the USA loathes most of Bush's domestic policy efforts. If we'd wanted a leader to throw more money at the problems we'd have voted to continue Clinton - Gore. I was against McCain at the time of the primaries because he seemed too liberal on domestic issues so I voted for the more conservative Bush.:dizzy2:
The Dems simply have to be numb. If they had run almost any candidate who was demonstrably a fiscal conservative and who would promise not to have cut the military further, they could have won either of the last two elections in a cake-walk.
I'd cut off my right pinky if it meant McCain in '08. :2thumbsup:
You're on.
You mean to tell me you've found a way to correlate the loss of my pinky to the elevation of McCain to president in '08? Share this information with me so that I may act upon it! :inquisitive:
Nah, mang, I'm just going to demand your dismembered finger if he does become president.
Actually, Cato is far more libertarian than conservative and they've been criticizing Bush literally for years over one thing or another- you should read what they think about Iraq. So, I think it'd be a mistake to characterize it as a "conservative backlash"
I regularly read their Daily Commentary (again, synced on my Palm) and I find that I almost always agree with them when it comes to fiscal and economic policy, but I sometimes find them to be a bit naive when it comes to foreign policy and immigration. Either way, I usually enjoy reading what they have to say.
It's a nasty pickle us fiscal conservative find ourselves in, Republicans are selling out their principles in hopes of bringing home the pork and buying votes/feathering their nests. But, what alternative do you have? Democrats love to attack Republicans on the deficit, but they're also the first to scream bloody murder when even the most modest budget reductions are suggested- so I have zero confidence that they'd reign in spending if they were in control. Sadly, it starts to look like the best thing would be the gridlock you'd find when you have a Democratic president and Republican congress. At least if nothing gets done, they're not screwing anything up. :wall:
mystic brew
03-09-2006, 15:51
Democrats love to attack Republicans on the deficit, but they're also the first to scream bloody murder when even the most modest budget reductions are suggested- so I have zero confidence that they'd reign in spending if they were in control. Sadly, it starts to look like the best thing would be the gridlock you'd find when you have a Democratic president and Republican congress. At least if nothing gets done, they're not screwing anything up. :wall:
*sigh* you may be right.
just wondering, wasn't that one of Clinton's achievements... didn't he balance the books better than the republicans before and after?
Taffy_is_a_Taff
03-09-2006, 16:06
*sigh* you may be right.
just wondering, wasn't that one of Clinton's achievements... didn't he balance the books better than the republicans before and after?
I think the Republican congress made him balance the books more than anything else.
mystic brew
03-09-2006, 16:09
so why isn't it doing the same to Bush? or was the vote a conglomeration of clinton haters and fiscally responsible folk?
yesdachi
03-09-2006, 16:09
I'd cut off my right pinky if it meant McCain in '08. :2thumbsup:
I think you should keep all the "right" parts you have. :laugh4:
What is so bad about McCain?
What is so bad about McCain?
By all accounts, he's an honest politician. That's going to keep him from winning the party nomination.
Crazed Rabbit
03-09-2006, 18:48
He also sponsered an unconstitutional bill (one of the provisions said no citizens could air ads 30 days before the election mentioning candidate's names), and has several other non-conservative views.
Crazed Rabbit
Don Corleone
03-09-2006, 19:47
McCain's not a conservative. He's really more of a libertarian than anything. Personally, I think he's great, EXCEPT for McCain-Feingold.
One of the main reasons McCain lost the primaries in 2000 so handily was because a couple of PACs (political action committees) with unnamed membership rolls started running attack ads against him. Bush swore he had nothing to do with them, but you'd have to be an imbecile to believe that. McCain took it pretty badly, especially when they started challenging his commitment to national defense and implied that he wasn't really a Christian (the whole Bob Jones stink). So, he decided to swat a fly with a sledgehammer (okay, hatchet job PACs in this country are a bit more of a fly, but it was a terrible solution to a moderately bad problem). What's more, he came off looking like a fool, because he let Russ Feingold (D- Wis) bamboozle him into writing the law that made media outlets (which tend to be pro-Democrat) and labor unions (ditto) as exempt. In the end, the union exemption was pulled, the media one was left in.
The net result of the act wasn't cleaner, more transparent elections. It wound up making the media the most powerful PAC in the country (and yes, Tim Russert is every bit the partisan advocate that say James Carville is).
Seamus Fermanagh
03-09-2006, 22:54
Mixed feelings on McCain here.
I don't always agree with him on Foreign Policy goals, but I admit that he has a cohesive view and that he'd exercise the CinC role with due caution.
He's too inclined to accept big government as it is for my tastes, without trying to hack back that particular jungle. Of course, I somewhat naively thought that Bush 43 would be more Reaganesque on this issue......:wall:
McCain-Feingold is not only unconstitutional, but directly begat the political power of MoveOn.org and its political equivalents. I agree with Don C wholeheartedly on this one.
For the non-US politics junkies out there, a short crib-sheet on McCain:
McCain would, from all appearances thus far be
Somewhat less interventionist on foreign policy than Bush-43, and more sparing in his deployments of the military. When deploying them, however, McCain is probably more inclined to pursue a total victory strategy.
Fairly liberal on size of government and entitlement programs. He'll embroider at the edges seeking improvement rather than trying for large scale change. On social issues he's mixed, being anti-abortion but for some gun control etc.
On economics, he's a bit of an unknown. He's never come out as a diehard low-tax guy and certainly hasn't pushed strongly to raise taxes.
Don Corleone
03-09-2006, 23:04
Oh, now come on Seamus. We need a touch more intellectual honesty out of you here. Bush-43 swore up one side and down the other how he'd reduce the role of government in our lives. The tax cuts were only one part of that, in general, he went on and on about reducing the power of government. Precisely where has that happened in the past 5 1/2 years? Hell, he hasn't even put a public-school voucher bill in to Congress, let alone fought for it.
Would you rather have a guy who swears up one side and down the other that he's a little 'c' conservative and will reduce the role of government, then grow it in an orgy of funded and unfunded mandates, or a guy who actually plays his cards from the table and says he might increase spending in one or two programs here and there?
Even if McCain implemented each and every program increase he suggested back in 1999, he would have grown the domestic budget at a small fraction of what Bush has bloated it to. And none of this 'it's post-9/11 security measures' business either. That just masks the problem. $400 billion in 9 years to the drug companies? Criminy...:no:
Proletariat
03-09-2006, 23:16
Dead on, Don C. At least when it's the other team doing this stuff to the government, you can scream all day about it and get a nice, self-righteous hey-I-didn't-vote-for-Clinton feeling. We've had the so called 'small government' guys storm in and send the whole thing to hell. Not even beginning to attempt to pretend to think about vouchers, even with all that conservative control. What a joke.
Christian Socialist would be right, but I'm not even sure he's done anything for them. Weren't they supposedly rallying around him because of the 'sanctity of marriage'? How's that working out for them?
I have more in common with Lemur politically than the administration I voted for.
:balloon2:
Seamus Fermanagh
03-09-2006, 23:19
Oh, now come on Seamus. We need a touch more intellectual honesty out of you here. Bush-43 swore up one side and down the other how he'd reduce the role of government in our lives. The tax cuts were only one part of that, in general, he went on and on about reducing the power of government. Precisely where has that happened in the past 5 1/2 years? Hell, he hasn't even put a public-school voucher bill in to Congress, let alone fought for it.
Would you rather have a guy who swears up one side and down the other that he's a little 'c' conservative and will reduce the role of government, then grow it in an orgy of funded and unfunded mandates, or a guy who actually plays his cards from the table and says he might increase spending in one or two programs here and there?
Even if McCain implemented each and every program increase he suggested back in 1999, he would have grown the domestic budget at a small fraction of what Bush has bloated it to. And none of this 'it's post-9/11 security measures' business either. That just masks the problem. $400 billion in 9 years to the drug companies? Criminy...:no:
Apparently, Don C, my tone was unclear. Aside from the tax cut initiative he put into place during the first year of his first term, Bush has done NOTHING to reduce government's role in a fashion that I find pleasing. His effort -- however doomed -- to hack away at Social Security was one of the few things I was happy to see since, and it tanked.
McCain may not have been quite so openly the "Straight Talk Express" man he claimed, but I agree with you that what he proposed would have hurt far less than some of what Dubya accomplished. McCain shot himself in the ass when he hammered the religious right so hard in VA and the Carolinas -- they have a lot of say in the primaries there -- and this hurt him in facing the Dubya & Company warchest.
Even so, I would have forgiven Dubya even that if the WoT had been prosecuted more effectively. But I do have regrets, and I'm still vexed.
We are pretty close to the same page on this.
You know I asked because every time I have seen the guy he comes off extremely well. He is that kind of guy I would damn near hug. Not slick, but warmly honest (if he really is honest or not is not the point). And of course his history does give him an edge, I find it impressive he can be that calm in person with those experiences.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that he doesn't seem like a politician.
And from your explaination of his political standpoints, I think I would like him very much. But then again I not American, nor will I ever become one.
Don Corleone
03-09-2006, 23:30
I gave W a D- in the 'grade the president' thread. As I said then, and I will say now, the only thing scarier to me than 4 more years of Bush would be 4 years of Kerry (or Gore for that matter). This is what I don't get about the Democratic party. Lemur, you guys MUST, you MUST have better quality candidates out there than Kerry and Dean. Hell, if you had put Gephardt up there (somebody I'm no big fan of), I would have had to have stopped and thought about it. But criminy... they asked Kerry what he would do if he was responsible for defending our country come January 2005: the first words out of his mouth were "I'd call the leaders of Europe and form a consensus". WRONG ANSWER. We don't need permission to run our country.
I agree with you 100% Prole. This is my point. I think the one-party: two-faces system we have in this country blinds us from what our true differences and similarities are. I have much more in common with Lemur than say the Bob Jones/Franklin Graham crowd (though I'll always have a soft spot for Billy). That probably scares Lemur turdless, but it's true... not all Republicans are Christian Taleban. :no: Were there viable parties out there forming coalitions, I'd vote for them, even if they were ideologically different from myself... If I believed they'd actually act in the best interests of the country, or even that I believe that they thought they were.
This is what I don't get about the Democratic party. Lemur, you guys MUST, you MUST have better quality candidates out there than Kerry and Dean.
I'm sorry, you must have this Lemur confused with a Democrat. I've been a registered Indy since I was old enough to vote. I really don't understand how moderate = Democrat in this forum. Let me explain it very carefully. I am a:
Fiscal conservative
Social liberal
Foreign-policy pragmatist
And even that is a massive simplification. Calling myself "liberal" socially is grating, since I don't believe in entitlements or other trappings of socialism. And calling myself a fiscal "conservative" hurts, since the people who call themselves conservatives have been the biggest pigs at the trough for the last five years.
Anyway, I'm all over the map, but it makes sense to me. I have made contributions to both Democrats and Republicans, although never in large amounts. If all of that adds up to "liberal" and/or "Democrat," then the problem with proper classification is entirely yours.
I have much more in common with Lemur than say the Bob Jones/Franklin Graham crowd (though I'll always have a soft spot for Billy). That probably scares Lemur turdless, but it's true... not all Republicans are Christian Taleban.
Doesn't scare me in the least, Don. I suspect that you and I would be extremely close on a lot of issues. The main difference would be that I find social activists of any sort irritating, and the loudest ones of late have all been from the American Christian Taleban. I'm all for stable families (unlike most of the Republican Senators, I'm still on my first wife), but turning our backs on science and progress is ridiculous.
Going back to the start of the thread, Bush 43 is the worst of all worlds for me. He's fiscally reckless, panders to the Christian extremists without doing anything of substance, an interventionist idealist without the practical skills or managerial expertise to pull his grandiose schemes off, a big-government lover, and he stuffs agencies critical to our future power as a nation (take a look at *any* of our scientific agencies) with unqualified cronies. Worst of all worlds. All the conservative negatives without any of the positives.
Proletariat
03-10-2006, 01:00
Going back to the start of the thread, Bush 43 is the worst of all worlds for me. He's fiscally reckless, panders to the Christian extremists without doing anything of substance, an interventionist idealist without the practical skills or managerial expertise to pull his grandiose schemes off, a big-government lover, and he stuffs agencies critical to our future power as a nation (take a look at *any* of our scientific agencies) with unqualified cronies. Worst of all worlds. All the conservative negatives without any of the positives.
I'm all for a Lemur/McCain '08 ticket. Where do I send my donations?
Tribesman
03-10-2006, 01:06
"I'd call the leaders of Europe and form a consensus". WRONG ANSWER. We don't need permission to run our country.
Right answer Don , it wasn't about permision to run your country it was about finding a united effective way to deal with the threat . Instead Bush tried it without consensus and has since then been trying to get consensus as it has all gone wrong .
As for the topic , Bush has shown that his grip on domestic policies are just as good as his grip on foriegn policies :laugh4: :laugh4: :laugh4:
Bush-43 swore up one side and down the other how he'd reduce the role of government in our lives.
Wow , a politician lied to the electorate to get elected . Hold the front page , thats a startling new phenomenum .:dizzy2:
I'm all for a Lemur/McCain '08 ticket. Where do I send my donations?
It's official -- Prole can make me blush like a schoolboy.
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