Conservatives are raging against Bush to hide the utter failure of their ideology.

No longer the "Right Man"

By Sidney Blumenthal

Oct. 20, 2005 President Bush is the most conservative president in modern times. He consciously modeled himself as the opposite of his father's split political personality. Fiercely attacked as a betrayer, the elder Bush was partially defeated by a conservative revolt. In a classic case of reaction formation, George W. Bush was determined never to make an enemy on the right.

President Bush brought the neoconservatives, banished by Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., back into government, and followed their scenario to the letter for remaking the Middle East through an invasion of Iraq, using 9/11 as the pretext. He meticulously followed the right-wing script on supply-side economics, enacting an enormous tax cut for the wealthy that fostered a deficit that dwarfed Reagan's, the problem his father had tried to resolve through a tax increase that earned the right's hostility. And Bush has followed the religious right's line on stem cell research, abortion and creationism.

For his vision of the world as black and white, his disdain for internationalism and international law, his tainting of the domestic opposition as unpatriotic, his unapologetic tax breaks and loopholes for the upper brackets, and his religious zealotry, conservatives celebrated him. "The Right Man" was the title of a glowing hagiography by his former speechwriter, David Frum (also author of the Bush phrase "axis of evil," or at least "axis of ..."). "Bush's Greatness" was the headline of an article published in the neoconservative journal the Weekly Standard just before the 2004 election. Critics of Bush, it contended, were haters, and haters of Bush hated all "American conservatives and especially white, religious American conservatives."

For his second term, Bush took his narrow victory as a mandate to govern from the hard right. At last, he would begin the privatization of Social Security, rolling back the signature program of the New Deal. But he stumbled upon a dirty little secret of conservatism: Members of the public support conservative presidents so long as they leave the liberal programs that benefit them alone. The more Bush barnstormed the country to promote his Social Security scheme, the more the public became aware of it and opposed him. Baffled and confounded, he plowed ahead, even as the Iraq war eroded his support. Then Hurricane Katrina blew the top off his administration's culture of cronyism. Meanwhile, the special prosecutor investigating the disclosure of a covert CIA operative's identity by senior administration officials has moved steadily and silently like a submarine toward his targets.