Reading notes

My answer to the title’s question:
Of course he isn’t. He’s a tool of over-the-top radicals.

According to the article, many conservative thinkers more or less agree:

Does [being a conservative in America] mean fighting messianic wars to spread America’s values into the far corners of the world? As the body bags continue to pile up in Iraq, a growing number of establishment conservatives have begun to voice doubts. Does it mean ramming through tax cuts at a time when the nation faces an array of new threats and challenges? Not to those conservatives who take the notion of fiscal responsibility seriously.

Interviews with an array of conservative thinkers and policy-makers reveal a rising disquiet on these matters among people who have spent most of their lives proudly identifying with the Republican Party and the philosophy for which they’ve long assumed it stood. At the root of their discomfort is a feeling not that the Bush Administration is too conservative but that it has forsaken the guiding principles of conservatism — prudence, caution, restraint — to pursue an agenda that is messianic and radical. …

“Many traditional, mainstream Republicans see America’s most vital juices being expended in Iraq,” says Halper. “They see an outflow of tax dollars and think of all the local services they will not have, all the unfunded state requirements, all of that not happening, and they worry about very large deficits saddling their children with debt.” …

As the London Financial Times observed after Bush’s second round of tax cuts was passed, this was not conservatism but madness. “On the management of fiscal policy, the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum,” the paper commented. “Reason cuts no ice; economic theory is dismissed; and contrary evidence is ignored. But watching the world’s economic superpower slowly destroy perhaps the world’s most enviable fiscal position is something to behold.”