Reading notes

Bush is still beloved by the Republican rank and file, the people who participate in voter drives and turn out on Election Day. Increasingly, though, there’s unease among some of the party’s elders, including veterans of the Reagan and Bush I administration. It’s not principally about Bush’s poll numbers, though they’re going down, or about the 2004 election, though it’s shaping up to be more competitive than most predicted a few months ago. It’s about something more fundamental. Though they don’t like to say it, when they look at the economy and Iraq, they can’t help worrying about where Bush is taking the country.

Bush, with his tax-cutting fervor, Manichean foreign policy rhetoric and disdain for church-state separation, appears to liberals as the apotheosis of Republican conservatism. Yet plenty of Republicans don’t recognize their ideology in Bush’s lavish deficit spending and the grandiose, world-transforming neoconservative foreign policy he’s adopted. …

Radiant with victory right after the fall of Baghdad, Bush and the neoconservatives who dominate his administration had seemed invincible. Yet as the death toll in Iraq and the deficit in America both shoot upward, neoconservativism has been discredited in the eyes of many. And Bush, says [Charles] Peña, is now irrevocably tied to neoconservatism. “There’s no going back for him,” he says.

This article reminds me I have no problem with real conservative values like personal, fiscal, and environmental responsibility, careful thinking, integrity (and so on). I harp on the need for them constantly.

But neoconservatism, which has metastasized throughout today’s Republican party, values none of these things — it only values power, accrued by any means necessary, and it wields its bloody power with clumsy arrogance. IOW, neoconservative thought comes straight from the pit of hell IMO. And, like many emanations from the pit of hell, it’s taking down a lot of good people with it.