More: No love Bush, no be conservative

Glenn Greenwald writes a follow-up to his article on the changing characteristics of what it takes to be considered a Conservative. In it he said: "Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based." Not surprisingly, the bulk of the criticism he received did not address his arguments but consisted of personal attacks which justified the dismissing his article beause he was a "liberal" or a "leftist".

Here are some excerpts. Go read the whole thing here...

It is somewhat amazing to write a post describing this phenomenon only for Bush followers to deny its validity and, in doing so, provide such vibrant examples of exactly what I describing. They read the post and then rushed to dismiss what I wrote as coming from a "leftist" all because I criticized Bush and his followers. I suppose I should be grateful for the argumentative support.

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Here is an example of a kind of intellectually honest conservative I was describing, Matthew Regent, who explains his perspective in a comment here:

I'm a Republican and a conservative. I voted for Bush twice. I didn't want to the second time, but it was a two-horse race, and the other horse was Carter redux. I disapprove of Bush's job performance and have more than once been called a liberal or equivalent on conservative blogs as a consequence, despite my beliefs, which put me solidly in the moderate-conservative portion of the political spectrum.

I disapprove of Bush's presidency for a number of reasons, including fiscal recklessness, the misprosecution of the GWOT, the nationalization of issues like education and marriage, and general incompetence on the issues, from Katrina to Miers. Frankly, I don't think Bush is much of a conservative himself. I think he's a low-tax liberal who gets along with religious people at home and a Wilsonian abroad.

And yet when I say as much to many Bush supporters, I'm the one who is branded the liberal, the troll, etc. Bushism IS a personality cult.

The list of long-time conservatives who are the target of all sorts of attacks and decrees of excommunication when they criticize George Bush is long and growing, and if anything, my post was a defense of those conservatives rather than some claim that they do not exist.

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None of the bloggers purporting to reply to the post addressed the fact that the arguments made by conservatives over the last three decades have been abandoned almost entirely and have been replaced by their precise antitheses -- all in order to justify George Bush’s conduct. The principal example used was the angry opposition to warrant-based FISA eavesdropping voiced by conservatives under the Clinton Administration, as compared to the stirring defense of warrantless, oversight-less eavesdropping now engaged in proudly by the Bush Administration.

But beyond that specific, quite revealing instance is the general disappearance of an anti-federal-government ethos. Principles of a restrained federal government and distrust of that government -- previously centerpieces of the conservative movement -- have been discarded like yesterday's trash in order to maintain praise of George Bush's actions and to maximize the powers and reach of the Federal Government now that Bush controls it.

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That Bush supporters abandoned all of their anti-federal-government rhetoric the moment they got control of the Federal Government -- whereby there was no longer any such thing as an excessively powerful Federal Government -- can’t really be denied. So the only option available to them is to justify the fundamental reversal of their views once George Bush took office, and it really isn’t pretty to watch.

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If The New York Times gave me a pen and blank piece of paper and said that I could write any article I wanted to support my argument from yesterday, I would have written the article published today by Bush admirer Elisabeth Bumiller, entitled "An Outspoken Conservative Loses his Place at the Table" (h/t Devoman in Comments). It begins this way:

What happens if you're a Republican commentator and you write a book critical of President Bush that gets you fired from your job at a conservative think tank?

For starters, no other conservative institution rushes in with an offer for your analytical skills."Nobody will touch me," said Bruce Bartlett, author of the forthcoming "Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." "I think I'm just kind of radioactive at the moment." . . .

Mr. Bartlett, a domestic policy aide at the White House in the Reagan administration and a deputy assistant treasury secretary under the first President Bush, talked last week at his suburban Washington home about his dismissal, his book and a growing disquiet among conservatives about Mr. Bush. . . .

He is unhappy, too, with the president's education and campaign finance bills and his proposal to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, which many Republicans call a dressed-up amnesty plan. The book, to be published by Doubleday on Feb. 28, also criticizes the White House for "an anti-intellectual distrust of facts and analysis" and an obsession with secrecy.

"I haven't switched to the Democratic Party," he said. "I wrote this for Republicans."

The article details how Bartlett, after being fired, has been shunned by conservatives for his blasphemy in criticizing George Bush on the ground that Bush has governed contrary to conservative principles.

Of particular note is this:

"Bruce is really an exception, not the rule, in the degree and thoroughness of his discontent," said William Kristol, a conservative strategist and the editor of The Weekly Standard. "So I wouldn't make too much of it. On the other hand, one thing I've noticed giving speeches in the last couple of months is that conservatives remain pro-Bush, but the loyalty to the movement and the ideas is deeper than the personal loyalty now. Two years ago, Bush was the movement and the cause."

That would be leading neo-conservative light William Kristol saying exactly what I said yesterday which (when I said it) was supposedly an example of crazed leftist idiocy: namely, that "Bush was the movement and the cause." Now granted, Kristol is claiming that this has changed over the last couple of years, but Bartlett's plight negates that claim rather strongly, and the fact that Kristol himself acknowledges a conflating of George Bush with "the movement and the cause" ought to give honest Bush followers serious pause for thought. Although Kristol says it in his characteristically understated way, it's a pretty serious condemnation to say that George Bush the person became the cause for "conservatives."