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A Contrarian View: Why conservatives should not support Bush.

One reason that conservatives have had for supporting the candidacy of
George W. Bush is not that they favor Mr. Bush (many of us have grave
reservations about his policies) but that they worry about a Democrat
victory presaging a sharp turn of the country to the left.  But this
is an unfounded fear: it's simply not going to occur.  The Reagan
revolution happened, and, regardless of who is elected in November,
it's not about to be undone.
 Actually, a Democrat winning the presidency in November would have
remarkably little effect on policy.  Republicans hold both houses of
Congress, and that's not about to change-- in fact, the best estimates
are that the Republican majority in both the house and the senate will
increase.  Liberal or not, a Democrat president isn't going to effect
any changes that won't first take a thorough Republican scrubbing.
 There are, in fact, many advantages in having the president and the
Congress elected from opposite parties, and it's argued that America
is strongest when they are.  The congress can serve as an effective
anchor on presidential excess, and a skeptical president can cut the
worst of congressional pork-barrel spending.  I am not one to argue
that the government shouldn't be trusted... but when one party
controls the government's purse strings, without anybody watching out,
congress always seems to see the public treasury as a great big candy
store.  That's when you see pork-barrel spending running out of
control.  (It's worth noting that the budget surplus the later part of
the Clinton administration came from a Democrat president held firmly
in check by a Republican congress.)
 But the main reason that conservatives shouldn't support Mr. Bush is
very simple: George W. Bush is not a conservative.  When you ignore
his talk, and looking at what he has actually done, you see that over
and over again, George W. Bush has betrayed every ideal that the
conservative movement has.
 The heart and soul of the conservative thinking is fiscal
conservatism: the government should be responsible for how it spends
money.  The conservative economic view has always been very simple:
balance the budget, and quit deficit spending.  That idea somehow went
out the window when George W. Bush was elected (in fact, suddenly we
are even hearing how deficit spending is somehow good for the nation.)
 What happened to the "lock box," where George Bush said he would put
the budget surplus to save it for social security?  The instant he got
elected, he seems to have forgotten his promise.
 The fact is, George W. Bush has run up a record budget deficit-- the
largest deficit in history.  And, before you say that terrorism and
the response to the 9/11 atrocity is the source of the unexpected
budget deficit-- look at the data.   Only a small portion of the Bush
deficit can be tagged to the 9/11 terrorists.  Bragging about
"cutting" taxes while actually increasing government spending at the
same time isn't really a tax cut; it's just increasing the tax next
year.  America is about our children, and leaving our children and
grandchildren in debt is not what we mean by "family values."
 The heart of America is our business.  Americans aren't afraid to
work... but where are the jobs?  A conservative president should be a
pro-business president, but in fact rather than helping business,
American businesses are going out of business; and the ones that are
staying in business are shipping jobs oversees.  No matter what Mr.
Bush's advisors may think, ramping up the deficit is not helping the
economy.
Mr. Bush says that education is his priority.  This is excellent, but
is the federal government really the right place to reform our
schools?  Education needs to be done at the local level-- right at the
level of homes and families-- and not by big-government mandate.  The
"no child left behind" laws, stripped of rhetoric, consist of nothing
except new  government-mandated standardized tests-- another unfunded
mandate from Washington that our states and cities have to pay for. 
Teaching children how to do well on standardized tests-- is what we
want to teach our children?  When did conservatism start believing
that the government in Washington is the right place to run our
schools?
 The conservative world view is that the era of Big Government is
over. Ronald Reagan knew that, and for that matter, so did President
George H. W. Bush.  But the younger Bush just hasn't gotten the
message.
 Iraq.  It goes without saying that America needs to be strong, and
that we should use every means of defending ourselves against those
who detest our freedom and despise our way of life.   Destroying the
Taliban, the stronghold of the Al Qaida terrorists, was necessary and
unavoidable; it was required for the defense of America.  But invading
Iraq? Long ago, John Quincy Adams wrote, "Wherever the standard of
freedom shall be unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her
benedictions, and her prayers be.  But she goes not abroad in search
of monsters to destroy."  It doesn't matter how loathsome a dictator
Saddam Hussein was; America should go to war only with great
reluctance, and as a matter of last resort.  America isn't in the
business of nation building.  Once, even George W. Bush understood
that.  During a debate with then-Vice President Al Gore in 2000, Mr.
Bush said: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's
called nation-building . . .. Maybe I'm missing something here.  I
mean, we're going to have a kind of nation-building corps from
America? Absolutely not."   Apparently to Mr. Bush, it depends on what
the meaning of "absolutely not" is.
 And fear of terrorism is no reason to erode our liberty. 
Conservative leader Pat Buchanan said, "It is remarkable how
complacent Americans seem to be, as our freedoms are gradually
restricted, and more and more power and wealth flow to Big Government
to protect us from terrorists."  Do we really need the 342-page
Patriot Act, to protect us from terrorism by giving the government
more rights?  Has we finally become a place where American citizens
can be picked up and held without lawyer and without charges,
indefinitely?  It is worth quoting Benjamin Franklin:  "They who would
give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither
liberty or security. "  When did we decide that we prefer our security
to our liberty?
 A final reason why conservatives should not support Mr. Bush is that,
quite frankly, he is not merely destroying the credibility of the
Republican party, he is damaging the credibility of conservatives,
period.  Is Bush really the person who we want the world to view as
the public image of conservatism?  For the last twenty years, Ronald
Reagan has been the image of conservatism in American.  Do we want
George W. Bush to be the intellect who will shape conservatism for the
next  twenty years?  Conservatism can survive a term of  Mr. Kerry as
president-- it may even make us stronger and more focussed.  But can
conservatism survive another term of Mr. Bush?
 No one will deny that Mr. Kerry is a liberal.  But even if he wins
the presidency, he will find a solid Republican Congress, and an
America united.  He is no threat to America.
 Bush, a wolf in sheep's clothing, is eroding our economy, our
liberty, and the very standing of our nation in the world.  His words
say that he is a conservative.  His actions, on the other hand, say
exactly the opposite.


Recommended reading:
Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan
Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, by Pat Buchanan

American Conservative magazine:
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover1.html
War without end: http://www.theamericancause.org/patthecheney.htm
The Case against Empire:
http://www.theamericancause.org/caseagainst.htm
The war party http://www.theamericancause.org/patthewarpartys.htm



max@yu.know (max) wrote in message news:<808b3f9bfb5d4465474deec9773c2d7a@userbeam.net>...
> Boycott Bush In 2004
> By Robert Locke 
> 
> Like most Republicans, I supported Bush the last time, but have
> finally been forced to the conclusion that the immigration-reduction
> cause, and the conservative cause generally, would be better off if he
> lost in 2004. So I urge the reader to withhold his vote and write the
> president why.
> 
> The calculation of the Bush administration and the globalist wing of
> the Republican party is very simple: they can count on your voting
> Republican in November no matter what. Therefore, they believe that
> they can get away with anything they want, and that if they get away
> with it this time, they will be able to get away with it next time,
> and the time after that, forever.
> 
> Frankly, they are right unless conservative voters do something to
> disrupt this calculus.
> 
> Karl Rove is right now telling Bush that he doesn't have to fear a
> revolt from anti-globalist Republicans because "they have nowhere to
> go." Well, they've forgotten a great American place: home.
> 
> I'm not suggesting you vote Democrat, it being an entirely different
> matter to actually support the opposition as opposed to withholding
> your vote from your own party when it strays from its principles. But
> I am suggesting that you either not cast a vote for president or write
> in a suitable protest candidate. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, an old
> acquaintance and founding chairman of the House Immigration Reform
> Caucus, would be the obvious choice.
> 
> Even before Bush announced his proposal to legalize virtually all
> illegal aliens in this country and open the borders to everyone on the
> globe who can underbid an American for a job, many conservatives were
> critical of him. Here's a partial list of why:
> 
>   * He endorsed the revolutionary Grutter decision that placed
>   nakedly anti-white racial preferences in the U.S. Constitution.
> 
>   * He has refused to tell the truth about the 1,300-year-old
>   civilizational war we are in, calling our Islamist enemies merely
>   "terrorists," as if they were a threat on a par with the ETA or
>   the Weathermen.
> 
>   * He has subjected the American people to intrusive random
>   security checks at airports while continuing to protect Muslim
>   foreigners from the racial profiling their own countries
>   practice.
> 
>   * He has left in office high-level Clinton appointees whose
>   competence and patriotism are dubious and whose ideology is
>   openly liberal.
> 
>   * He has left in place a feminist agenda in the armed forces
>   which kills women and impairs our defense.
> 
>   * He has pushed and signed the insanely egalitarian, hugely
>   expensive, and unconstitutional "No Child Left Behind" Act.
> 
>   * He has legitimated the white-guilt theory that is rotting
>   Western Civilization, giving a speech in Africa denouncing
>   historic white America in terms that exceeded Bill Clinton.
> 
>   * Then he sent $15 billion to African dictators under the guise
>   of fighting AIDS, a disease almost wholly caused by immoral
>   living.
> 
>   * He has declined to respond in any serious way to the Democrats'
>   outrageous blockade of his judicial appointments.
> 
>   * He has renewed the funding of the radical anti-American
>   organization UNICEF.
> 
>   * He has signed the largest expansion of the federal welfare
>   state in a generation, the funding of prescription drugs for
>   Medicare recipients.
> 
>   * He has signed the patently unconstitutional McCain-Feingold
>   law, the aim of which is to subject political speech to
>   bureaucratic controls as in the soft-totalitarian European Union.
> 
>   * He has sought to buy off social conservatives with his faith-
>   based initiative which, far from helping strengthen religion in
>   America, will co-opt churches and other religious organizations
>   by making them dependent on federal largesse.
> 
>   * He has evaded the issue of gay marriage and then proposed a
>   constitutionally-dangerous amendment that he knows will be almost
>   impossible to pass.
> 
>   * He has continued the free-trade extremism that is gutting
>   America's industrial base and has given us a jobless recovery.
> 
> As a result of these betrayals of conservative principles, Bush was
> barely deserving of support prior to his (latest) immigration-
> expansion initiative. With it, he has finally crossed the line into
> being a proactively destructive force in American life who must be
> stopped before he destroys the Republican party, the country, or both.
> 
> I am inexorably forced to the following conclusion: Bush is no more
> than a wolf in sheep's clothing, a liberal and a globalist who merely
> pretends to be a conservative, like he pretends to perform manual
> labor on his luxury ranch in Crawford, in order to get elected. He
> proactively believes in the racial sodomization of America, in
> globalism, in his fantasy that everyone in the world, in the Middle
> East as in California, is going to just forget the intergroup
> conflicts that have been the driving force of history for thousands of
> years and just "get along" under a bright blue sky of stock options.
> He even sees a family interest, through the future career of his
> dynastic heir his nephew, in the Hispanicization of America. His
> idiocy is not the product of mistaken advice and it is not the product
> of tactics: he genuinely believes in every dumb thing he says and
> every dumb thing he does. He is not our friend; he is just another
> sector of enemy territory.
> 
> The Republican establishment does not take grassroots conservatives
> like immigration reformers seriously unless it is forced to. Its
> priority is its careers and its core agenda is corporatist globalism,
> dressed up in conservative veneer just thick enough to fool the
> gullible rednecks. Nothing less than bringing down a Republican
> president, which would wreck many of their careers personally, will
> get their attention.
> 
> But oh boy, would it do that!
> 
> 
> http://www.americandaily.com/article/4687