Special Inauguration Week BOW Award

[davidbcoe]

I'm still not ready to return to the full-length BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award entries I was posting during the political campaign.  But I did want to give out this special Inauguration Week BOW Award, because it seems so richly deserved.

No, I'm not giving it to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, for his mangling of the

Comments

[arhyalon]

>I thought George Bush and the Republican leaders of Congress for most of the last decade were conservatives.

You don't have many conservative friends, do you? Otherwise, you would know that...no, George Bush is by no means a conservative, and the conservatives have been despairing of him for years now. (He is a Republican, but there is a whole group of Republicans who are not conservatives. McCain is another, which is why he had trouble appealing to the conservative voting base. Before Palin, they weren't behind him at all.)

But, you are absolutely right...hoping the president fails is just vile and petty! I much prefer the attitude of Zo (Alonso whatever-his-name-is, the young, black, conservative who makes all those funny web casts) who hoped very much that Obama does well, despite his objections to him. He shows a much greater breadth of mind.

[davidbcoe]

Conservatism knows many forms, I guess. George Bush's social views were and are deeply conservative. So was his approach to foreign policy, which ignored the UN and international diplomatic efforts in favor of military aggression and unilateralism. So was his approach to the environment. To my mind, the only thing that wasn't conservative was his profligate spending and refusal to face budget realities.

[kmarkhoover]

I know many conservatives like to say GWB really isn't a conservative. (I'd be trying to distance myself and my party from him, too, if I was a member of the GOP.) But like it or not the old Goldwater brand of conservatism is long dead.

The modern day GOP has morphed into something Goldwater would find totally unrecognizable. So would T.R. So would Eisenhower. So would Lincoln.

THAT Republican Party -- one of true fiscal/economic/environmental conservatism -- is dead and gone. And it ain't coming back.

[davidbcoe]

Mark wrote: "THAT Republican Party -- one of true fiscal/economic/environmental conservatism -- is dead and gone. And it ain't coming back."

And for proof of this, one need only reflect on this Presidential campaign. If there is a modern day Republican who comes close to this old ideal, it's the John McCain of 2000. And in order to win his party's nomination this time around he had to sell his soul to the hard-core right. Sad, but true. In my opinion, the closest thing to old-school GOP conservatism that exists today is the Democratic Blue-Dog Coalition.

[arhyalon]

Bush was in the center on most of the things you mentioned. The real conservatives are much farther over and had been right from the beginning of his term. In both foreign policy and the environment, he fell quite short of what the conservatives were looking for.

In fact, it oftened amused me -- in a sad way -- to hear my liberal friends yelling and screaming about how far to the Right Bush was at the very same time that my conservative friends were railing on about how short Bush was falling of what they wanted.

[davidbcoe]

If the "Real Conservatives" are that far to the right of Dubya I can only pray to every god I can think of that they never find themselves in a position to influence policy.