Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

Yet another Republcan figures there’s more to gain from telling the truth than to keep spreading the lies. If you really care about the favorable things Vic Gold previously wrote about Bush and Cheney, you can check out the report in The Washington Post. His new book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP, tells a different story:

His book, to be published this month by Sourcebooks with an initial print run of 20,000 copies, offers quite a different assessment of the two most powerful men in Washington. Under Bush and Cheney, he argues, the GOP has moved away from principles of small government, prudent foreign policy and leaving people alone to live their private lives — all views Gold associates with his hero, Goldwater. “Invasion of the Party Snatchers” makes plain Gold’s contempt for the direction of his party and the guidance of its leaders.

“For all the Rove-built facade of his being a ‘strong’ chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times,” Gold writes. “Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots.”

Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. “A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control.”

For all their talk about ideas, conservativism is really a movement about greed and grabbing power. The seek the power first, and then work backwards to come up with ideas, such as supply-side economics, to justify what they wanted to do in the first place. The problem with a movement which is all about power is that everyone loves you when they see your coat tails as a way of sharing power, but few will go down when your ship starts sinking. I’m sure there will be many more conservatives who will try to distance themselves from the disasters of the Bush years.