Blame the Bush

Ilana Mercer calls a spade a spade:

Bush is destroying the country (national debt: $9 trillion; national identity: Babel). But try and saddle him with that responsibility and you come up against reams of rationalizations, none of which includes the possibility that Bush is … well, bad. The neocons are blamed for the war; big business and Felipe Calderón (and before that Vicente Fox) for the bleeding borders. And Bush's "commendable" fealty to friends is to "blame" for the nomination of stumblebums Miers, Gonzales, and "Brownie" of FEMA.

I liked Bush when he started out. Libertarians were generally hopeful about a president who promised a humble foreign policy and less taxation. I still liked Bush when he chased bin Laden in Afghanistan. But soon after, the real Bush revealed himself to anyone willing to see: A man with a megalomaniacal glint in the eyes and an unstoppable will to wage war on a backward, secular, harmless Arab state, hobbled by sanctions.

One of the more interesting spectacles of the second Bush's administration, and especially its latter half, has been the inability of conservatives to lay the blame for their problems where they most belong: at the feet of President Bush. It will take time for history to pronounce judgment on the latter Bush, but he will undoubtedly go down as one of the most corrupt presidents of all time. And whereas Nixon wore the crown of ignobility without really deserving to do so, and while other corrupt presidents, such as Kennedy, have escaped a similar fate, Bush II's will be well-deserved.

Perhaps most importantly, he cannot help but go down as one of the least conservative presidents in the history of the office. His willful violation of civil liberties is on par with Lincoln's imprisoning of journalists who portrayed him and his senseless war in a bad light and with FDR's internment of the Japanese--though Bush has failed to intern as many as FDR did, our perpetual war on terror will no doubt give impetus to future uses of the evil Patriot Act. His irresponsible expansion of federal government is Johnsonian. And his war-mongering puts him on par with almost every Democratic President since Wilson, excluding the woefully incompetent Carter.

Bush has been an absolutely unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party. Whether the party learns its lesson remains to be seen, but as long as conservatives refuse to condemn a man who has, time and again, defecated on the very things they hold dear, conservatives do not deserve to march under the banner of one of their own.