George W. Bush (Corporatist–NLBG)*

Charming, frat boy, dry drunk/wet drunk, born again, Reagan's heir, compassionate conservative, arrogant, delusional, and now liberal.

Bush, The Liberal [Jonah Goldberg]
Richard Cohen discovers something some of us on the right have been saying for a while: if you hold your head just so and look at Bush from the right angle, he looks an awful lot like a liberal.

Is it fair to call Bush a liberal? Well, it's certainly not fair to liberals, that's for sure.

Is it fair to call Bush a conservative? William F. Buckley has said that Bush is conservative but not a conservative. Buckley should know, I guess.

What is clear is that Bush is and always has been a corporatist. Whenever competing political interests collide, when push comes to shove Bush is a corporatist above all else.

What George W. Bush would do as president could have been predicted -- and was predicted by Molly Ivins -- by what George W. Bush did as governor of Texas. In Shrub and Bushwacked, Molly warned us: Look at his record, look at his record, look at his record.

Since the bidness of bidness is bidness, and bidness will always be taken care of in the Texas Legislature, you have to measure a governor by asking how much political capital he is willing to exhaust on behalf of those outside the bidness community. What's the governor willing to do on behalf of what some of us still naively refer to as the public interest?

You don't need a Ph.D. from the LBJ School [of Public Policy] for this one either: Dubya takes care of bidness.

Bush's enthusiasm for reckless privatization, ruinous tax cuts, tort reform, potentially catastrophic deregulation, fierce protection of energy interests, and dubious faith-based programs was already in evidence in Texas, as was his well intended but askew passion for education "reform." And he was always a genuine and tearful sucker for immigrant success stories, as well as an astute appreciator of the importance of cheap and unregulated immigrant labor for key business sectors.

So why the shock and wailing among conservatives in particular and Republicans in general about Bush's immigration stance, his support of the expanded Medicare prescription drug program, and his willingness to run huge deficits and debt? I guess they didn't look at his record.

Backlash conservatives and the Christian Right never looked much beyond Bush's born-againisms, his antichoice stance, and his longtime role as "a professional derider of the sixties."** Like them, he hated experts, real and imagined coastal elites, and dirty fucking hippies. Praise the Lord.

But Backlash Conservatives also fear the Vermination of America, and worse vermin than dirty fucking hippies, Michael Moore, and Cindy Sheehan are illegal aliens, especially those coming up through the Mexican border.

Well, competing political interests collided and push came to shove.

Dubya took care of bidness.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.
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*NLBG stands for the National Laboratory for Bad Government, a phrase used by Ivins and other Texans to describe their state. Since Governor Bush obviously had no foreign policy record to examine, Ivins made no predictions about what President Bush's foreign policy might be, other than "not Clinton's." As we all know now, the Neocons stepped right into that power vacuum. And the enormous expenses incurred in Iraq have not exactly conflicted with corporate interests, either.

**"When asked recently by the editors of the Wall Street Journal which book (besides the Bible) had most influenced him, this is what Gov. George W. Bush said:"

The Dream and the Nightmare by Myron Magnet crystallized for me the impact the failed culture of the sixties had on our values and society. It helped create dependency on government, undermine family and eroded values which had stood the test of time and which are critical if we want a decent and hopeful tomorrow for every single American.[link]