COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

...To manufacture a right wing fraud to repudiate George Bush is underway. And Glenn Greenwald proves himself to be remarkably obtuse in the process. Here's GG:

The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a "real conservative." This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who -- when his presidency looked to be an epic success -- glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.

That interpretation is just retarded. As is so often the case with the Left, Glenn Greenwald is operating from a set of assumptions about conservatives taken more from left wing bumperstickers than from anything approaching empirical observation.

Conservatives have been putting serious daylight between themselves and the Bush presidency for years, and vice versa. The Democrat's downfall has been their incompetence in failing to realize that, and run a conservative candidate for President to defeat him!!!

Greenwald's underlying assumption - that and Reagan Conservatives ever thought of Bush as one of their own is easily disproven by going back to the 2000 campaign and even before. In a speech in Indianapolis in 1999, Bush characterized the Reagan/Goldwater postulate that government is best when it simply gets out of our way "a destructive mindset."

Bush was never a fiscal conservative. He talked a good game with the tax cuts. But it was years before he vetoed any kind of spending bill. Instead, he was a rubber stamp for an increasingly irresponsible Republican congress. This is well-documented. Andy Sullivan parted company with Bush in this regard long ago, before Sully came off his psychotropic medications.

Bush and social conservatives crossed sabres early and often. Bush crossed them when he agreed to compromise on embryonic stem cell research.

Even the UK Guardian considered him "unideological," as did I, and this was back in 2000!!!

This same George Bush whom Green Glenwald is desperately trying to pigeonhole as a conservative, after all, is the very same Bush who was giving Democrats fits back in 2001 and 2002 by stealing their issues! Case in point: The No Child Left Behind Act that Bush administration officials coauthored with Kennedy.

Honestly, Mr. Sock puppet: Would a conservative ideologue have even considered Harriet Miers for a SCOTUS nomination?

Was the Left Coaster perpetrating a fraud when blogger "pessimist" wrote, in August of 2004, that George Bush is No Conservative?

Didn't William Bryk write The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush in 2004, not 2007?

Would a Goldwater Conservative have aided and abetted the Medicare Spending Boondoggle on taxpayers - the largest entitlement increase in recent memory?

Did not the CATO institute take the Bush energy bill to task thusly: "three parts corporate welfare and one part cynical politics...a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington" that "does little but transfer wealth from taxpayers to well-connected energy lobbies." (Taken from the Bryk essay linked to above).

All this happened long, long before Bush's recent polling troubles.

And people like Michelle Malkin have been blasting the president's determined negligence on border enforcement for years - and justly so.

If Bush were such a damn conservative, they wouldn't have to describe his post 9/11 foreign policy as "neo-conservative." They would just call it "conservative." And only the most ignorant or obtuse (read: GG) could possibly argue that George Bush's post-9/11 foreign policies could not be distinguished from the paleoconservatives - the ones in the GOP who opposed Clinton's intervention, for example, in Kosovo (which I supported, by the way.)

Bush's foreign policy is about as unconservative as you can get. Rather, Bush's foreign policy - when he doesn't chicken out, which is too rarely - is liberalism personified: A commitment to emerging democracies and the willingness to shake up the status quo in order to further the cause of freedom abroad. The 'drain the swamp' strategy in the middle east is the antithesis of conservatism.

In order for the sock puppet to create this ridiculous thesis, he has to ignore nearly the whole of the political history of the last eight years.

And the sock-puppet's echo chamber of Salon doofuses simply reinforce his stupidity.

My favorite commenter is the one who accuses Bush of "raising taxes."

If Bush raised taxes, why are so many Democrats wanting to repeal the Bush Tax Cuts?

If Bush raised revenues, isn't that simply a roundabout admission that supply side economics works when it comes to stimulating growth?

Greenwald is simply nauseating here. I cannot fathom why he has become as big as he has. He's not that smart. He turns a pretty phrase now and again. He just doesn't understand them.

Then again, the media - including the America-haters at Salon* - will let a writer get away with anything as long has he's a lib.

A conservative writer has to be five times better than a liberal to get a break with a mainstream publication. And maybe not even then.

Splash, out

Jason

Salon editor Gary Kamiya wrote: "I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings."

This is in an essay he wrote "celebrating" the fall of Saddam Hussein.

No, Gary. Serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people do not wish for the death of U.S. troops and our allies, and that is exactly what you wished for. Such people are unserious and morally blinded, by definition. If they are intelligent, it is only in the sense of an elevated ability to betray their countrymen.