Bushophiles try to dismiss the president’s critics by branding them as liberals and relegating their arguments to the files reserved for whiners.
A reader treated me in this manner after I dared describe the 2000 election as a blemish on Bush’s presidency.
It took two months to find out who won the election. A few hundred Florida voters decided our nation’s fate and the rest of the world rolled their eyes at our system of government.
Not that I didn’t enjoy giving Slobodan Milosevic an easy opportunity to question the legitimacy of our leader, but I’m sticking to my “blemish” theory.
Welcome to the “you are either with us or against us” era. Now cognitively clumsy neoconservatives can answer skepticism with taunts and insults and leave political discourse to the rest of us losers.
Criticizing the president is ideologically equal to mentally undressing Saddam Hussein. A disdain for preemptive strikes simply hides the desire to sabotage troop transports.
However, I’m keeping my conservative-bashing to a minimum, because I might be a conservative.
Conservatism seems to vary as much as heavy-metal music. There are populist conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarian conservatives, grindcore conservatives, thrash conservatives and ’80s hair and makeup conservatives.
Perhaps I’m confusing topics.
Regardless, I often agree with members of the Right.
The first few times I sympathized with Pat Buchanan scared the hell out of me, but I learned to accept him and, perhaps, love him.
Why do you think those elderly Jews in Broward County voted for him?
Plenty of conservatives deride the current antics of the Bush administration. Bush scoffed at Clinton’s ventures into peace-keeping and nation-building, only to plunge American troops into a most ambitious attempt at tearing down and rebuilding a sovereign nation.
To some conservatives, Democrats enjoy engaging in unpredictable foreign conflicts-not their beloved Republican Party.
Now, Bush’s coy ignorance of foreign affairs and insistence on clearly stated “exit strategies” seem like distant memories.
Some conservatives yearn for smaller government and freedom for the individual.
Now we have an administration which forms unwieldy bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security and puts forth laws, such as the Patriot Act, scaring civil libertarians on both the right and the left.
The most conservative guy I know says Bush uses the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, to excuse forays into imperialism and onto constitutionally shaky ground. He says it’s just an excuse for fulfilling the wish list of Bush’s corporate benefactors.
Then he explains how Ronald Reagan was the best president ever…damn liberal.