Bush -- the liberal

Digby and Glenn Greenwald have predicted and are now responding to the bizarre claims by "real" conservatives that Bush is no conservative and, in fact, he's a liberal! And you thought it couldn't get more bizarre. Yes, that's right, these conservatives work like a Soviet 5-year plan -- it changes such that at the end of five years, it has changed to have predicted whatever did in fact come to pass, so that it never fails. The conservatives (who, you will recall, were rather proud to call George one of their own a few years ago when he was polling better) conclude that if George is an unpopular failure, he can't be a conservative because conservatives don't fail.

Glenn:

It is, to put it mildly, rather bizarre to watch people claim that there is nothing notable or new about calling George Bush a "liberal" -- caveats or not -- or that doing so is really no different than complaining that his adherence to conservative doctrine is something short of pure and absolute. Since at least the 1980s, our political dialogue recognizes two opposing, hostile camps -- conservatives and liberals. "Liberals" are the traitors, the lunatics, the ones against whom Rush Limbaugh has been viciously railing to 20 million people, 4 hours a day for the last 20 years. "Liberals," as Karl Rove told us, are anti-American and allies of The Terrorists

That's how "liberals" have long been talked about -- they're the subversives, the weak losers, the socialists, the Friends of the Terrorists, the lunatics, the anti-American bad ones. At best -- in more sane, less "unhinged" right-wing circles -- they are wildly misguided and are the political enemies of conservatism. Whichever approach one takes, it is self-evidently startling and politically significant to hear that, after all this time, George Bush -- presumably along with the entire Republican leadership in the House and Senate which passed every spending bill since 2003 -- is, to at least some extent, now one of them, an actual liberal. It is hard to understand how one can pretend that to suddenly stick the "liberal" label on Bush, even partially, is unnotable and really nothing new.

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As Hunter observed:

Fiscal and other conservatives may say that they value small government, but it is a fact of the movement that when in a position to actually implement those policies, they do not. . . .

They shuffle the tasks of government around, yes; they close so called "liberal" governmental tasks such as environmental protections and citizen welfare and safety programs, while hyper-boosting "conservative" governmental tasks such as defense spending and business-based "incentives" and other sops . . . but post-Nixon conservatives have been remarkably consistent in their actual actions: increase spending; increase deficits; increase government; increase interference in citizen lives under banners of "religion" and "morality".

Ultimately, Bush's ideological purity matters little. It is conservatives whose support twice put him in office, who vigorously supported him for virtually his entire presidency, who never objected to his being described and self-labeled as "conservative," and who -- with rare exception -- repeatedly claimed him as one of their own. I understand the desire to re-cast Bush as a "liberal"; he's now akin to a live grenade frantically being tossed around because nobody wants to be stuck with him in history.

But for conservatives, this effort is futile. Bush is indelibly branded in the public mind as a conservative, largely because of the unyielding support given to him by most conservatives. For that reason, his failure will almost certainly be viewed as a failure of conservatism, despite the last-minute and rather unprincipled effort by conservatives to engage in an emergency re-labeling campaign.

Digby:

There is a very interesting discussion taking place all over the left blogosphere about how the conservatives have discovered that the entire Republican establishment, particularly the George W. Bush administration, are liberals. Glenn Greenwald has been directly taking on Jonah Goldberg on this subject (which is something like my cat "taking on" his toy mouse), Hunter at DKos has written a lengthy and fascinating explication of the process, and Kevin Drum, in a different vein, discusses political Lysenkoism as the consequence of conservative loyalty over policy.

Those who have been reading this blog for a while know that I've been talking about this for some time as well (here, here and here) as has my pal Rick Perlstein, an expert on the conservative movement, who went into the belly of the beast last fall and talked about it right in front of the grand poohbahs of the conservative movement. (An academic version of the Colbert Miracle, IMO.)

This has been percolating for a while, but is now exploding in full effect as the fog of 9/11 lifts and Bush's failure becomes manifestly obvious to the vast majority of Americans, including many who voted for him.

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Today, the CIA is crawling with liberals. The military is crawling with liberals. The Bush administration itself is nothing but a bunch of liberals as must be the GOP congress since they signed off on everything Bush has proposed. The media are, needless to say, nothing but squishy liberals.

The country is going to hell in a handbasket. The president and the congress and all their policies are dramatically unpopular. This, then, is just further proof of the failure of liberalism.

The only thing that can save us is conservatism.