Tuesday, October 18, 2005
The Unraveling Cloth of Bush's Regime
Is Penelope back at unweaving things, again? The carefully woven fabric of Reagan-esque economic reactionaries, libertarian free-thinkers, the Fundamentalist Christian Right, and big business seems to be fraying much too fast for normal wear-and-tear. The economic people are furious because Bush has indebted the nation for generations to come; the libertarian wing of the Republicans is up in arms over the expanding police power of the federal government as well as the alignment of corporate, church and state power; the Christian Right, of course, is furious because Bush hasn’t really done much more than subsidize some major churches through “faith-based programs.” The religious people would like to see more enforcement of bible-based laws—presumably by making homosexuality a capital offense and forcing non-believers into mandatory conversions.
The conservatives are finally recognizing that the current administration is a get-rich-quick scheme that carries an increasingly big stick. Nobody is happy over Iraq; dissenting over war policy means being purged. The economy isn’t growing fast enough. The outbreak of scandals and snafus is embarrassing the nation. Bush’s cowboy stance doesn’t play well in the board-rooms. (If there was a draft, and the children of the ruling class starting getting drafted, Bush and Cheney would suddenly become incapacitated, Rumsfeld fired, and Condi Rice would decide that war is not a good idea.)
However, we’re still stuck with these fools.
The New York Times
October 18, 2005
In Sign of Conservative Split, a Commentator Is Dismissed
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 - In the latest sign of the deepening split among conservatives over how far to go in challenging President Bush, Bruce Bartlett, a Republican commentator who has been increasingly critical of the White House, was dismissed on Monday as a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative research group based in Dallas.
In a statement, the organization said the decision was made after Mr. Bartlett supplied its president, John C. Goodman, with the manuscript of his forthcoming book, "The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."
Mr. Bartlett, who was a domestic policy aide at the White House in the Reagan administration and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, confirmed that he had been dismissed after 10 years with the center but declined to make any further comment.
The statement from the organization said Mr. Bartlett had negotiated a deal last year to reduce his workload to give him time to write a book about economic policy and taxation for which he had received a six-figure advance. The statement said that the manuscript he showed Mr. Goodman was "an evaluation of the motivations and competencies of politicians rather than an analysis of public policy." The statement said the organization did not want to be associated with that kind of work.
In response to a question about whether the administration had pressed the organization about Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Goodman relayed a reply through a spokesman saying he had never had any conversation about Mr. Bartlett with anyone in the White House.
***.
The choice "of a patently unqualified crony for a critical position on the Supreme Court was the final straw," [Bartlett] wrote.
In "Impostor," which is scheduled to be published in April by Doubleday and has already attracted attention on conservative Web sites, Mr. Bartlett expands on many of the themes he has struck in his columns and other writings. He is critical of the administration for policy decisions like backing away at times from its commitment to open trade and for failing to sell conservative ideas like introducing investment accounts to Social Security.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The conservatives are finally recognizing that the current administration is a get-rich-quick scheme that carries an increasingly big stick. Nobody is happy over Iraq; dissenting over war policy means being purged. The economy isn’t growing fast enough. The outbreak of scandals and snafus is embarrassing the nation. Bush’s cowboy stance doesn’t play well in the board-rooms. (If there was a draft, and the children of the ruling class starting getting drafted, Bush and Cheney would suddenly become incapacitated, Rumsfeld fired, and Condi Rice would decide that war is not a good idea.)
However, we’re still stuck with these fools.
The New York Times
October 18, 2005
In Sign of Conservative Split, a Commentator Is Dismissed
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 - In the latest sign of the deepening split among conservatives over how far to go in challenging President Bush, Bruce Bartlett, a Republican commentator who has been increasingly critical of the White House, was dismissed on Monday as a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative research group based in Dallas.
In a statement, the organization said the decision was made after Mr. Bartlett supplied its president, John C. Goodman, with the manuscript of his forthcoming book, "The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."
Mr. Bartlett, who was a domestic policy aide at the White House in the Reagan administration and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, confirmed that he had been dismissed after 10 years with the center but declined to make any further comment.
The statement from the organization said Mr. Bartlett had negotiated a deal last year to reduce his workload to give him time to write a book about economic policy and taxation for which he had received a six-figure advance. The statement said that the manuscript he showed Mr. Goodman was "an evaluation of the motivations and competencies of politicians rather than an analysis of public policy." The statement said the organization did not want to be associated with that kind of work.
In response to a question about whether the administration had pressed the organization about Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Goodman relayed a reply through a spokesman saying he had never had any conversation about Mr. Bartlett with anyone in the White House.
***.
The choice "of a patently unqualified crony for a critical position on the Supreme Court was the final straw," [Bartlett] wrote.
In "Impostor," which is scheduled to be published in April by Doubleday and has already attracted attention on conservative Web sites, Mr. Bartlett expands on many of the themes he has struck in his columns and other writings. He is critical of the administration for policy decisions like backing away at times from its commitment to open trade and for failing to sell conservative ideas like introducing investment accounts to Social Security.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
