This should be fun.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0624-03.htm
Published on Tuesday, June 24, 2003 by the Miami Herald
True Conservatives Should Take A Stand
by Robert Steinback
Conservatism in America, as I once understood it, is dead.
Or it may only be missing in action, but it is almost nowhere in evidence lately. Conservatism was last seen being abducted by the Bushervatives.
These folks view politics not as a contest between competing ideologies but as a mission to defeat the nefarious ''other side,'' however defined. They have no consistent ideology, as near as I can tell, except to be against anyone who isn't with them.
Such people alarm me, for those who consider winning more important than ideological clarity can't be trusted to use power wisely and in the national interest.
I miss authentic conservatives, not because I've ever been accused of being one, but because I love to debate them. Debates are tests of crisply presented ideas, facts and logic. Authentic conservatives love putting their ideas on the line in lively discussions with those of my ilk.
Bushervatives don't do debates. They are the spawn of the Newt Gingrich/Rush Limbaugh win-first school of politicking, which asks, Why enlighten people when you can confuse them?
Why talk with ideological opponents when you can insult them? Why engage them individually when you can debase them collectively? Why talk about your candidate when you can invoke the ghost of Bill Clinton?
George W. Bush calls himself a conservative. He cuts taxes, mentions God a lot and wears cowboy boots to international summits -- but he doesn't sound much like the conservatives I've known and debated.
Based on Bush's performance, conservatives could be cast as the people who unbalance balanced budgets with massive tax cuts, who mangle and misstate the truth to goad the nation into supporting an invasion, who applaud an all-powerful central government that can spy on and detain individuals while answering to no one, who favor big business over small entrepreneurs and who shirk international cooperation yet complain when other nations don't roll over for us.
They could be cast as people who play games with words. Millions of antiwar demonstrators are ''focus groups.'' Poor Haitian refugees are terrorist threats. The war we started is declared over even as American military personnel keep dying. A Federal Communications Commission ruling enabling huge media conglomerates to scarf up more newspapers and broadcast channels is called a boost to competition.
They could be regarded as people who thrive on confusion, as evidenced by the recent poll showing that a third of the American public believes U.S. forces actually found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Or as those who thrive on fear, moving our ''terrorism threat index'' up or down for reasons no civilian can evaluate.
This isn't true conservative ideology; this is Bushervative mishandling of government.
I'm well acquainted with why liberals and moderates are highly distressed by governance of this sort. But I don't understand why true conservatives are silent.
True conservatives, for example, support lower taxes and smaller government. But I never thought they'd countenance tax cuts so extreme that, when piled atop a weak economy, turn a projected $5.7 trillion budget surplus into a now-projected $4 trillion deficit. That's not conservative. That's irresponsible.
I never figured true conservatives would tolerate parlor tricks like Congress purportedly trimming the president's requested $726 billion tax cut to $350 billion by attaching an expiration date -- yeah, sure -- to the cuts.
If tax cuts were in order, the true conservatives I've known would rather maximize the number of Americans who would benefit rather than giving the lion's share to the already-rich. An across-the-board benefit -- in flat dollars, not percentages -- would deliver significant tax relief to far more modest-income people, who would more likely spend it and boost the economy.
And so on. My guess is that ideological conservatives have been flimflammed into believing that even Bushervative hypocrisy is better than the dreaded ''other side.'' Though lately, a few are showing signs of stirring from their stupor.
Columnist William Safire blasted the Bush administration stance on the FCC changes. Fellow righty George Will has mustered enough nerve to gingerly hint the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq could represent a credibility problem for the president. More than a few conservatives opposed Bush's cynical stance against the University of Michigan's diversity admissions policies.
Still, Bush is poised to do more damage to the concept of pure conservatism than anyone since the nation's leading conservatives locked arms against the Civil Rights movement a half century ago.
And that would take all the challenge out of debating conservatives. It would be too easy.
Copyright 2003 Knight Ridder
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