Posted on 03/12/2006 3:11:35 PM PST by FairOpinion
The author, Jeffrey Hart,is a professor of English (emeritus) at Dartmouth College, a former speechwriter for presidents Reagan and Nixon and, most recently, the author of "The Making of the American Conservative.
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William F. Buckley Jr. has defined conservatism as "the politics of reality." Ideology is the enemy of conservatism because it edits, omits or ignores reality. George W. Bush is an ideologue.
Iraq is commonly said to be the centerpiece of Bush's presidency. The United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But nearly three years after the invasion, no such weapons have been found. And evidence is mounting that the intelligence used to bolster the claims for Iraq's WMD was cherry-picked, politically pressured and, to use intelligence expert Thomas Powers' word, "fabricated."
Ideology.
As Buckley wrote in two recent columns, our Iraq policy "didn't work." The Bush centerpiece has been an astonishing flop.
A major triumph of American conservatism since World War II has been general acceptance of free-market economics in political discourse. This economic system works. It produces goods and services efficiently.
Yet free-market economics pushed to exclude other worthy goals becomes an ideology.
Bush is not a conservative. He has bushwhacked the term. He is a right-wing ideologue.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Which leads me to ask -- what on earth is the matter with him? Is he channeling Howard Dean? It sure sounds like it.
His thesis isn't bad, but his ludicrous rantings on WMD's are out of the deepest darkest depths of moonbatism.
Note with care the college where the author teaches. Dartmouth is hardly a bastion of what Scfalia would call "Originalist" thought or academic activity..
We wish! LOL!
If conservatives are just now discovering that Bush is not a conservative, I have to ask what kool-aid have they been drinking? Answer, the media's.
How can you write so assuredly about weapons not beig in Iraq with the tapes that have recently surfaced?
Actually the ones drinking the koolaid here are the Mike Savagites who cling to the notion that only their rabidly paranoid delusion world view is "Conservative". Actually the Savagites aren't Conservative at all. They are merely Big Govt Reactionaries. They would have NO problem massively increasing the size, scope and reach of the Federal Govt in the areas of Trade, Border Security, Economic Nationalism and Culture Policing. The Whine All The Time Choir continually whine about Federal Spending but really are just pissed because the Govt isn't spending on what THEY want. They have no more interest in Limited Government then the Deaniac Leftists. They merely want the Fed Govt to do different things FOR them.
I guess he carefully ignores the latest news, it would interfere with his rant.
Finding answers to Iraq’s WMD
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1595153/posts
Again, I think the main thesis: Bush is ideological as opposed to Buckley's definition which is that conservatism is anti-ideological. Of course, I don't agree with either, 100%, but it's worth pursuing.
If you want the weakest argument, though, WMD's would have to be it.
Agree with this much.
Mostly semantics, but the observation that Kissinger foreign policy is not necessarily conservative but expected by old guard makes sense to me. Some call it realism, but moral equilvalence is its mainstay. We don't usualy call that conservative.
President Bush has always been a centrist - this right-wing ideologue crap is just something that the left-wing jackasses dreamed up.
I call pants-on-fire.
The writer is pro-abortion. He is in favor of marketing fetuses. He's against privatizing Social Security. He's against the war.
Bush is not a conservative ideologue, as some said, we could only wish. But compared to this guy, he's as good as could hope for on at least several of the issues of the day.
We went into Iraq to hang Saddam. We won. Saddam is finished.
Sadly, abortion is still legal. But the constitutional justification for it is built upon a fiction. Bush is helping to overthrow that fiction by putting constitutionalists on the court. If the writer is conservative, how does he oppose constitutionalist judges?
Sadly, while Bush is against marketing fetal tissue, he did not outlaw fetal research. This writer is a professor, how does he not know that? Bush disallowed the use of federal money for fetal research. Any pharmaceutical company, any university can kill all the fetuses they want, as long as they do it with private money.
And Bush failed to create a national 401K. I'm not sure a national 401K is a conservative goal, but it has to be closer to conservative values than the present Social Security system.
This writer is no conservative.
Reagan wasnt really Reagan either....
note: he put O'Conner on the court which was very un-Reagan of him
""Bush is not a conservative. He has bushwhacked the term. He is a right-wing ideologue."'
and here I was thinking Bush was a RINO who betrayed the Reagan legacy.
What is it about GWB that drives people, both left and right insane
So what's the difference between being ideological and being principled?
It's an interesting thing to think about. I happen to think it's silly to dismiss ideology out of hand, as Buckley apparently does. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction against the ways of the Left, which is hugely ideological and prone to getting lost in abstraction and theory. Buckley probably reacts against that and prefers to think of conservatism as organic and ultimately grounded in experiential wisdom. HOwever, I'd guess that Buckley would also agree that conservatism has a high regard for principle or being principled -- and I'd almost bet that you could trip him up by asking him what the difference is in being ideological and being principled. I mean, isn't calling Bush a rightwing freemarket ideologue just a snotty way of saying that Bush is a principled believer in free markets?
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