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Bush,
the Conservative Imposter
Conservative voters, we hear, are solidly behind George W. Bush,
“because President Bush is a strong conservative.” But,
just what is it that makes President Bush a conservative?
He says he’s a conservative, but what if we follow the advice
of Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell to “watch what we do, not what
we say”? Bush
says he’s a conservative, but what he does sure doesn’t make him a
fiscal conservative. He has
transformed a $230 billion surplus he inherited from the “liberal”
Bill Clinton into a $440 billion deficit in three years—by far the
worst fiscal record in American history. Bush
says he’s a conservative, but what he does sure doesn’t make him an
anti-federal spending conservative.
He has increased discretionary nonmilitary federal spending at a
rate about twice as fast as it increased under the “liberal” Bill
Clinton.
Bush says he’s a conservative, but what he does sure doesn’t
make him an anti-big, intrusive government conservative.
He has taken the position that the government should have many
secrets from the people, but the people can have almost no privacy from
the government.
Bush says he’s a conservative, but what he does sure doesn’t
make him a foreign policy conservative.
He has thrown conservative caution to the wind and foolishly
taken us into the sort of war that General Omar Bradley accurately
called the Korean War: “the wrong war in the wrong place, at the wrong
time, against the wrong enemy,” undermining our vital war on terror.
Bush says he’s a conservative, but what he does sure doesn’t
make him a champion of true freedom.
He asserts that we are fighting for freedom in
President Bush seems to believe in freedom and fighting for
it—or, rather, sending others to fight for it—but his version of
freedom is the sort that the people in
“How dare anyone criticize me?” Mr. Bush’s statements
imply. “I’m the
president of a free country?”
So just what makes this man a conservative?
He cuts taxes on the rich. Maybe
that’s all some people who call themselves conservatives care about.
But I don’t think that’s all that most conservatives want. Labeling
a man with this record a “conservative” is deceptive advertising.
It is about as accurate as Fox News, which is essentially a
24-hour-a-day mouthpiece for the Republican party, claiming that it is
“fair and balanced.”
Such noted conservatives as Tucker Carlson, Charley Reese, and
John McLaughlin have turned against President Bush, largely because of
the foolish, unnecessary war into which he has taken us.
When Carlson was asked on August 30 whether it was true that he
wasn’t going to vote for Bush, he responded, “I think the war in
The word conservative means keeping things as they are.
If only President Bush had conserved things the way they were
under President Clinton, we would all be vastly better off.
But he didn’t. Those
conservatives who now wish to keep things the way they are in When
George W. Bush says, “I’m a conservative,” voters who accept
anything he says on the basis of faith in their Leader will buy it.
For those who use evidence to judge whether a statement is true,
however, that claim is in the same league with his assertions that his
record deficit, net-job-loss economic plan is working and that his
catastrophic invasion of When
it comes to his claim that he is a conservative, George W. Bush is what
he is on the
With apologies to William Shakespeare, let us modify Juliet’s
words so they apply to George W. Bush calling himself a conservative:
What’s in a name? That
which calls himself a “conservative”
By any other name would smell as sour. { Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson,
Mississippi, is the author of Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the
Course of History, and is currently completing his first novel and
screenplay, What It Feels Like. } |
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