Quick Note: Taking Responsibility for Your Choices
Conservatives are still trying to distance themselves from the Bush era, trying to claim that it wasn’t really conservatism, that Bush & Co. strayed from true conservative policy, and therefore conservatism isn’t stained by Bush as much as people make it out to be.
The thing is, you can blame Bush and reject him as much as you want, but you cannot avoid a simple fact: conservatives voted for Bush and relentlessly supported and defended his policies over the eight years of his administration. Some disagreed on isolated issues, some fully rebelled over time, but most stayed the course–and most voted for John McCain, who ideologically ran on the ‘Bush 2.0’ ticket despite all his claims about change.
You can’t continuously support someone and try to extend his legacy, and then months later try to claim that he violated most of your principles and wasn’t really your guy.
Furthermore, I would say that you can’t state that his policies were catagorically different from the policies of any other Republican/conservative president in the last 30 years. Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all preached the same message – small government, tax cuts and fiscal responsibility. Then they proceeded to swell the government and create massive deficits. The only difference was as to the degree – both Bush I and Reagan, when they saw where the ideology was taking them, i.e. when the saw the headlights from the train that was barreling down in the country’s economy, agreed to tax increases. Not so Bush II.
The whole movement is idiocy.
Conservatives are everywhere the same. They deny history and then try to rewrite it and project it into the future. This is exactly what the conservatives in Germany in the 1920s. The blamed defeat in WWI on Jews, Liberals and backstabbing traitors. They shoved their way into power. Then proceeded to act upon the facts that they fabricated on, only to end up at an even worse place than before.