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The way I see it, we conservatives have always held principles to be more important than the man. We criticized the Rats for their weathervane policies and their worshipping of Bill Clinton as though he could do no wrong. And here when we're doing the same thing, the defense from some quarters on here is its politics and the President knows what he's doing. Now if this same defense were applied to Clinton, it would be roundly condemned and ridiculed as pandering to the lowest common denominator and elevating the President to an absolute dictator. The thing is when President Bush breaks faith with the base, there's this tendency to excuse it instead of reproving him for it and insisting he uphold the principles that our movement is dedicated to and to fulfill the conservative agenda in the work of our government. If Rush is excoriating the President, its out of a sense of responsibility to keep him from continuing on a course that is detrimental both to his political future and to the future of this great country. Let's hope President Bush takes it to heart for he will thank us for it later.

Rush is asking the wrong questions.

He wants to know whether there were any warning signs that the conservative movement was being "hijacked" (to spin on the navel-gazing of our intelligence operations as of late). What he needs to be asking is:
1) Why did he fail to see Bush's policy of compromise and capitulation while Governor of Texas? The record was there. He never bothered to look.
2) Why did he fail to notice when Bush brought aboard Norman Mineta and some leftist types in the Republican party into his cabinet that perhaps they would be able to influence policy?
3) Does the Republican Party suffer from "Battered Wife Syndrome"? Are Republicans so used to being abused by Democrats that they cannot assert their own power to lead themselves? Why is it that the **minority party** continues to set the agenda and get what they want while the **majority party** knuckles under to their will, offering only half-hearted liberalism not federal rollback conservatism??

The answer to the first two are obvious. In his zeal to see a Republican in the White House again, Limbaugh and many other leaders in the conservative movement simply failed to see what Bush really was. A conservative that was all hat and no cattle in his conservatism. Talks a good game, sounds real convincing but rarely stands up to the Democrats when it counts. The answer to the third question gets clearer every day. We have a party so accustomed to being kowtowed that they'd rather be beaten up than to stand on principle. And it looks like this will get worse before it gets better.

Limbaugh is late to the party. Rather than trying to convince us that W. is "Reaganesque", he should have been examining what this man actually did while running the state of Texas.