The Kitsap Pundit

I didn't see any honest case for giving Bush a second term, and was angered by the dishonest case--he's done a brilliant job of fighting terrorists, he's a tower of wisdom and resolve, he's going to control big government, he's going to protect traditional values, he's got a second-term agenda to create an "ownership society"--advanced by his campaign.

Moreover, I came to believe strongly that the real agenda of the people closest to Bush--including his political advisors and much of the Republican congressional leadership--was not only dishonest, but deeply cynical and irresponsible: a drive to simultaneously wreck the federal government and to perpetuate their control over the wreckage as long as possible through the exercise of the rawest sort of institutional power and corruption. And moreover, this belief made me angry at even those Republicans who did not share that agenda, because they were helping to promote it against their own best instincts.

... I didn't know anybody who went to prep schools or had Ivy League--much less Top Ruling Class--aspirations when I was in high school, so Bush doesn't bring back those kind of memories. What I most dislike about Bush personally is his happy complicity in the GOP myth-making machine that treats him not as a rich kid who found a new spiritual home in Texas, but as the opposite: a salt-of-the-earth character who's achieved world-historical greatness as the Winston Churchill of his time. That's a double lie, and he lives it every day.

And maybe that's the bottom line. I think today's Republican Party, and its leader, are built on a foundation of fundamental dishonesty about who they are, what they want, and where they are taking the country.

I've heard much the same thing for a long time. It's nice to see it assembled so succinctly.

# posted by Al Hedstrom @ 21:43