Jonah Goldberg's "George W. Bush, Preservative"
Has government become the answer?
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following G-File is a version of a talk I gave Tuesday night to the Conservative Party of New York State. It was delivered before the State of the Union.
A few quick facts. George W. Bush has:
increased federal spending on education by 60.8 percent;
increased federal spending on labor by 56 percent;
increased federal spending on the interior by 23.4 percent;
increased federal spending on defense by 27.6 percent.
And of course he has:
created a massive department of homeland security;
signed a campaign-finance bill he pretty much said he thought was unconstitutional (thereby violating his oath to uphold, protect, and defend the constitution);
signed the farm bill, which was a non-kosher piñata filled with enough pork to bend space and time;
pushed through a Medicare plan which starts with a price tag of $400 billion but will — according to every expert who studies the issue — go up a gazillion- bajillion dollars over the next decade;
torched Republican — and American — credibility on trade, in both agriculture and steel;
got more people working for the federal government since the end of the Cold War;
not vetoed a single spending — or any other bill, and he has no intention of eliminating a single department;
sold out like a fire sale at Filene's on Title IX, a subject I know a little about because my wife is the foremost expert in the universe on it;
pushed to send more Americans to Mars while inviting a lot more illegal immigrants to hang out here in America.
And that's all before Bush went into reelection mode. Read Tuesday's lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and you'll find that this is the spendiest (yes, that's right, "spendiest") president in American history, second only to LBJ.
Maybe there's something about presidents from Texas — they like everything big down there, including their government.
All of this pandering reminds me of H. L. Mencken's comment about Harry Truman. He said that if there were a sizable number of voting-aged cannibals in the U.S., Truman would promise each a Christian missionary in a boiling pot.
So spare me this mindless blather about how George Bush's radicalism runs too hot. This guy is too sweet.
Of course, this is all just another way of saying he is a "compassionate conservative." I'd prefer "conservatism with a human face" — but that reference is probably too obscure, and makes the inherent insult of compassionate conservatism too obvious.
Regardless, as my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru — who's done a lot of serious thinking about all of this — rightly points out, you can't say we weren't warned. Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural that "government is the problem."
George W. has never said anything of the sort. In fact, he even said last Labor Day, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."
The Gipper would have spontaneously burst into flames if he'd said something like that
snip
If Bill Clinton had proposed spending over a billion dollars on marriage counseling, conservatives would have howled about how Clinton was a "social engineer" (and how he should probably have spent that money closer to home first). Well now conservatives are the social engineers. The content and aims of the engineering may be different; they may in fact be conservative, good, and necessary. But they don't represent limited government by any stretch of the imagination. And therein lies the best defense of George Bush. He's not so much a conservative as, well, a "preservative." I suppose I could call him a "preservationist," but preservative has that nice Bush sound — like "strategery" or "misunderestimate."
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200401211053.asp Now, Southack...where's that list of yers, my FRiend?!
FReegards...MUD