From Andrew Sullivan:
A few years back, your correspondent noticed something a little odd about George W Bush’s conservatism. If you take Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that a socialist is someone who is very good at spending other people’s money, then President Bush is, er, a socialist.
Sure, he has cut taxes, a not-too-difficult feat when your own party controls both houses of Congress. But spending? You really have to rub your eyes, smack yourself on the forehead and pour yourself a large gin and tonic. The man can’t help himself.
Pat Buchanan also has noticed the excessive spending:
David Keene of the American Conservative Union, sponsor of a recent appreciation dinner to honor the embattled DeLay, noted that, even before Katrina, "spending was spiraling out of control" and conservatives were "losing faith" in Bush and the Republican Congress.
Even if you exclude the military and homeland security, says Keene, spending increased $300 billion between 2001 and 2005, as U.S. debt grew by $2 trillion. This translates into a permanent bite on taxpayers of $100 billion unto eternity, to pay the annual interest on that part of the national debt run up by George W. Bush alone.
Buchanan explains why this is happening:
With the passing away of the Greatest Generation and the passing from power of the Silent Generation, born in the Depression and raised in the 1940s and 1950s, the baby boomer generation, in which a "you-can-have-it all!" mindset was early embedded, now runs both parties and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
So Buchanan concludes:
When Republican leaders are saying there is no more fat in the federal budget, the proper political translation is that the Grand Old Party of Taft, Goldwater, Reagan and Helms is no more. We have become the very people we went into politics to run out of town.
This is what happens when so-called moderate Republicans compromise with the Democrats. Of course the MSM does not help by only promoting the socialist agenda. Its time the MSM and the far-left Democrats are exposed for who they are. Its time for true conservatives to have the courage to implement Sibby's rule number one: "Don't do what the Democrats say".
