Not a hint of irony in his voice…
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007Well, lately it seems like the right is all a twitter over the immigration bill, but some right-wingers are still all about Bush and what he says goes and we need to support him because of 9/11 and the conservative movement will suffer from a big spending debt-inducing fuck up being criticized.
DJ Drummond over at Wizbang cites an article that’s just full of crap. He makes the best choice for a pull quote, too, because it demonstrates just how fucking ridiculous the arguments can get.
Jonah Goldberg for instance, just a few days ago wrote that if you “look at Bush from the right angle, he looks an awful lot like a liberal”. But back in 2003, Goldberg wrote this about the President:
“Georrge (sic) W. Bush has proved that he’s a Reaganite, not a “Bushie.” He may not be a natural heir to Reagan, but that’s the point. The party is all Reaganite now. What better sign that this is now truly and totally the Gipper’s Party than the obvious conversion of George Bush’s own son?”
Was Goldberg lying then, or is he lying now? That is, after all, how the Liberals will cast it, and it’s hard to claim Goldberg was honest in both places.
Okay. Explain that to me. Why is it hard to believe that he was honestly happy 4 years ago and isn’t now? I don’t even see where the two aren’t reconcilable, but apparently Drummond agrees with Glenn Greenwald in that if you once supported Bush, you must always or you’re dishonest.
Why does Jonah Goldberg have to be lying? In 2003, you could make the case that Bush was pretty conservative. Sure we were at a deficit, but it was in the midst of a war and two years after a catastrophe that wreaked havoc on the economy. Sure we were fighting a war, but it was Afghanistan and we didn’t ask for it; we had no choice.
Fast forward to 2007. El Presidente hasn’t vetoed any spending bills except for one that came with a “we’re not just going to keep opening the Treasury for you without some kind of exit strategy for Iraq” string. In the end Bush vetoed his first bill, the Democrats pussied out, and now he gets his money and still has no timetable. In other words, the clustefuck continues with no end in sight because ending this would be somehow admitting defeat.
The deficit has steadily climbed higher and higher with no sign of it ever decreasing. Despite the Bush administration jumping up and down about revenues being up, we still don’t have any better a handle on the deficit. Tax breaks may be working, but their benefit isn’t being felt by anyone right now, and our man in the White House is still spending his ass off.
Then there’s the immigration bill. Greenwald rather non-ironically claims that “none of the reasons for conservative discontent” are new and that Bush’s immigration position is old hat. Why yes, Glenn, it is old hat, but until 2007 he never acted on it. Imagine that. People didn’t react to the President’s views until he acted on them. Oh yeah, and Greenwald doesn’t even mention that Bush called his conservative base (the same people Greenwald can’t seem to understand the turn from) fear mongerers for daring to call his amnesty plan amnesty. Nope, he doesn’t even mention that at all, because that would ruin his plan of painting anyone that disagrees with Bush as a hypocrite and flip-flopper.
Instead Greenwald goes out of his way to pull quotes from people from years ago before the Iraq war was a mess, before the immigration bill was out there, and before the President turned on every person who stuck with him no matter how fucking dumb he was acting, and then proceeds to imply that in the intervening time nothing changed except the people who made the original quotes.
It’s intellectually dishonest in the worst possible way, and Drummond not only falls for it, he adds to the fire in a spiteful way:
I understand the frustration among Conservatives. I am still a Conservative myself, though many of the Bush-haters have pretended otherwise. And that’s the problem. We know there are many more Conservatives than Liberals, and we know that any serious consideration of the Conservative vs. Liberal arguments would prove the superiority of the Conservative position. We also know that the American people will follow a Conservative leader, indeed are hungry to do so. The only way Conservatives can lose, therefore, is when they allow themselves to become fragmented and factionalized. The only way that regular people can come to believe that Democrats are a better choice for leadership than Republicans, is if Republicans attack other Republicans and prove they cannot seek answers and solutions.
It’s too much, perhaps, to expect apologies from the people who have poured gasoline on the fire. But at least the rest of us can try to work with the other Republicans, and the other Conservatives, for the good of the nation and the hope of the future. Because if we do not, History shows us how painful the price of that hubris can be.
What a bunch of disingenuous bullshit. The only way we can prove what great leaders conservatives are is to worship at the alter of the guy who called people acting in a conservative manor bigots and fear mongerers? Are you kidding me?
Conservatives aren’t “allowing themselves” to become fractionalized. Quite the opposite, actually. They’re rallying behind principle before they rally behind someone who’s abandoned it.
If that isn’t a demonstration of both leadership and fortitude, I don’t know what is, and Drummond comes off as nothing more than a “toe-the-line” partisan. The ironic part is that no one is ever going to confuse that kind of person with a leader.
Technorati Tags: dj drummond, glenn greenwald





