The record of a so-called conservative:
When President Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion. Now it is $10.6 trillion — and Congress voted in October to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion, the seventh such hike since President Bush to office and the second since last July. If, as is quite likely, we reach the new ceiling by January 20, the outgoing President will have managed to amass more debt than all of his predecessors combined.
And I sometimes think he’s totally oblivious to the mess he’s leaving behind.
H/T: The Daily Dish
You forget that Bush, himself, never claimed the mantle of conservative. It was the press that kept calling him a far right wing nut. Conservatives, especially in 2000, worried that he was too “centrist” and liked to “cross the aisle” to easily. And except for the war, we were right. He is NOT a conservative. He’s just a Republican.
Throughout the 2000 campaign, he called himself a “compassionate conservative” — whatever the heck that meant — and leading conservatives claimed him as one of their own, mostly because they just wanted to be back in power again.
Actually, you are right. I was pinging on my own rejection of HIS definition. The “leading conservatives” that I follow in the media and politics DID NOT claim him. He was welcomed and voted for (if that’s a sentence) in 2004, but mainly because the alternative choice was horrible. His “compassionate conservatism” was and is an insult to conservatives. He gets good grades on on standing fast on the GWOT but his loyalty to failed policies almost destroyed that.