Memo to Liberals: Bush is on Your Side
Issue Brief
The Bush Administration has released portions of a National Intelligence Estimate to rebut charges that the war in Iraq is promoting terrorism. It isn’t common for the government to disclose the contents of secret intelligence assessments, but with mid-term elections approaching the White House is determined to tell its side of the story to voters.
In the same spirit of full disclosure, I would like to let you in on the biggest secret that President Bush is concealing from the electorate. The secret is that he’s a liberal. Yes, yes I know — he’s a lifelong Republican and devout Christian. But that’s what makes the conspiracy so effective, because nobody suspects the truth. Behind his conservative facade, Bush is an agent of the Clinton-Soros-Streisand axis. All you have to do is connect the dots…
Iraq: The President said we were invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction. By that measure, the war was won three years ago. But then he embraced nation-building, a strategy based on the longstanding liberal belief that cultural differences aren’t important and people everywhere want the same basic things. Oddly enough, nation-building is working about as well in Iraq as it did in Haiti and Somalia.
Immigration: Ignoring the traditional xenophobia of his conservative base, Bush has refused to crack down on illegal immigration and instead wants to give millions of lawbreakers a shot at citizenship. Rather than sealing a porous border that might allow terrorists to gain easy access to America, Bush says we should recognize the aspirations of struggling third-world people for economic opportunity. After all, their kids will be voters some day. Very liberal.
Entitlements: Federal outlays for social-welfare programs have been rising almost twice as fast under Bush as they did during the Clinton years. In fact, President Bush has fashioned the biggest new entitlement program in a generation with his plan to subsidize the cost of prescription drugs purchased by seniors. No one knows how much it will ultimately cost. Bush also has created the biggest new bureaucracy in decades, the Department of Homeland Security, which uses entitlement-like formulas to dole out federal largess to states and localities.
Education: Another program Bush has embraced is No Child Left Behind, a typically liberal initiative in which federal bureaucrats interfere in the local management of schools. Instead of eliminating the Department of Education as conservatives hoped, Bush has made it more powerful. Like many liberals, Bush doesn’t think bad schools are caused by lazy kids or irresponsible parents — it’s “the system” that’s at fault, and we’re all victims.
Spending: Conservatives used to think that initiatives like prescription drug subsidies and No Child Left Behind wouldn’t be possible if they starved the government of money by cutting taxes. But since Bush has a liberal’s indifference to deficits, lack of money has not slowed the growth of government at all. If this is what conservatism has become, liberals should relax and plan to spend more time in Provincetown next summer, because they’ve won.
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