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I don’t know of any self-respecting conservative who said that which you put in quotes. None.

OTOH I do recall Rush back in 2003 lamenting Bush’s cave in on steel tariffs. Not to mention fighting Bush on medicare part D drug benefit, alongside almost 2 dozen fiscal conservative Republicans. You dont see anything at all like that on the liberal side wrt Obama, at least not right now. Even anti-TARP liberals have gotten strangely quiet over Obama’s bank bailouts.

When my elderly liberal Mom whined in 2004 about that Medicare part D program, as if it wasnt right/wasnt enough, solely because Bush was behind it, I realized that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” big-spending triangulation was a failure. It was designed precisely to win people like her over - it failed. Many conservatives knew it then and were arguing against it the whole time. Not to mention immigration and the “Jorge Bush” types. If you were one of them, you make my point - conservatives were NOT blindly following Bush like lemmings. They were dissenting from the right.

It was because the conservative grassroots ARE NOT GOOD FOLLOWERS (including the conservative talk radio hosts) that Bush ended up very unpopular and our GOP ‘leadership’ scattered and is now a minority, regrouping and licking wounds. A political disaster that was borne out of political hubris, just as Iraq suffered from a different hubris in the execution of that war ... except Bush rescued Iraq and never rescued GOP domestic policy.

I think Obama’s $16 TRILLION in spending in 4 years and the Democrat Congress’ double digit increases in domestic spending, tripling of S-CHIP and ‘downpayment’ of almost a trillion dollars on socialized medicine is for sure a Big-Govt spending spree on a whole new level beyond what Bush ever did. The idea that Republicans lost moral authority to speak these truths simply because some of them might have erred and supported Bush when he was fiscally irresponsible on a much smaller level is absurd.