Maybe, as fans of small government, they're angry that he used FEMA so effectively to save lives and to save the city of New Orleans, before, during and after Hurricane Katrina.
Could it be that Bush was too tough on corporations, refusing to give them tax credits for exporting American jobs, or blocking any massive giveaways to them under his prescription drug bill?
Or was it that the Bush White House was just too much in favor of corporate regulation, across the board?
Are they mad that the Bush White House flinched at politicizing the institutions of government à ‚¬" for example, I'll just pick one at random here, the Justice Department à ‚¬" in order to turn them into agents of the Republican Party?
Or are they angry that there was hardly any cronyism in the administration, so that party workers could never get government jobs à ‚¬" say like running the Iraq occupation, for example à ‚¬" because the president was too scrupulous.
Probably they're just furious that Bush let accused terrorists and other assorted brown people run free in America, because he didn't have the guts to defy a bunch of mamby-pamby lawyers and open up a bottomless-pit of a jail in some hell-hole somewhere, like say at Guantà ¡namo Bay.
And I know they're still mad that he didn't have the stones to steal elections when push came to shove in confronting those tough, take-no-prisoners Democrats.
Are all of these failings why regressives don't think George W. Bush was one of them as president? Of course not. In fact, Bush did all of these things. In fact, he and his fellow-travelers fulfilled every single item on the regressive wet dream checklist during his presidency.
Except for two. First, they expanded the size of the national government through reckless spending. And, second, because they were careful not to take any popular goodies away so that voters would experience the real pain of regressive politics, they paid for it all (and the tax cuts, and the wars) by borrowing. Future generations could pay for it. Plus interest, of course.
Those are both important issues to the right, to be sure, but it is absolutely ludicrous to argue that those two items, stacked up against everything else he gave them listed above, remotely suggest that Bush was not a conservative. Utter nonsense.
So what's going on?
The obvious answer is that Bush was a total disaster as president who was hated by a country that couldn't wait for the clock to run down on his nightmare. Who wants to be associated with that?
The less obvious answer is even more telling, though. It's true the Bush folks were grossly incompetent, at least at the things they didn't care so much about. But the deeper and more profound reality is that this was far less a failure of one fool than it was the acid test for an entire ideology, which in fact failed the exam miserably.
I know how shocking it can be that regressives are hypocritical or deceitful. Go figure, eh? But, truthfully, this is the biggest whopper of them all. The King Kahuna. The Mother of all Deceits. So big, in fact, that I'm pretty sure that they even lie to themselves about it at the same time they're lying to us.
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