By Brad Friedman on 8/22/2004, 5:10pm PT  

(Blogged by Brad from an Espresso shop in Westport, WA...)

I've been making the case for years that George W. Bush and his supporters are certainly not "Conservative". Not in any classic, Goldwater sense for sure. I've taken to referring to them as Fake Conservatives. Conservative when it serves them politically, and beyond that, happy to spend into oblivion and/or outstretch the arms of the Federal Government into just about any area of private life they wish to. Nothing "conservative" about either of those ideas.

And it looks like Pat Buchanan, of all folks, is helping to make the case.

Drudge breaks the skinny on Buchanan's new book, WHERE THE RIGHT WENT WRONG: How Neoconservatives Subverted The Reagan Revolution And Hijacked the Bush Presidency.

I'm on the move, so don't have too much time. Will just post a couple of quotes from the book. See the link to Drudge above for a full boatload that are sure to put a burr under Rove, Rush and Hannity's Fake Conservative saddles.

"There is no conservative party left in Washington. Conservative thinkers and writers who were to be the watchdogs of orthodoxy have been as vigilant in policing party deviations from principle as was Cardinal Law in collaring the predator-priests of the Boston archdiocese."

"The Beltway Right has entered into a civil union with Big Brother."

"Under the rubric of conservatism, the Republican party of Bush I and II has been reinventing itself into what conservatives would have once recognized as a Rockefeller party reciting Reaganite rhetoric."

"[A] civil war is going to break out inside the Republican Party along the old trench lines of the Goldwater-Rockefeller wars of the 1960s, a war for the heart and soul and future of the party for the new century."

"Kristol's warning that neoconservatives could go to Kerry was an admission of what many have long recognized. The neoconservatives are not really conservatives at all. They are impostors and opportunists."

"This is democratic imperialism. This will bleed, bankrupt and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about."

"[L]istening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden's prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks --- and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation."

"We are not hated for who we are. We are hated for what we do. It is not our principles that have spawned pandemic hatred of America in the Islamic world. It is our policies."

"Often, terrorism succeeded in the 20th century, and, when it did, the ex-terrorists achieved power, glory and immortality, with streets, towns and cities named for them....America today recognizes every regime to come out of these wars where terrorism was a common tactic."

"There is no conservative party in Washington. There is a Democratic Party of tax-and-spend and a Republican Party of guns and butter and tax cuts, too. Washington is all accelerator, the brakes are gone."

"Bush has compiled a fiscal record of startling recklessness."

Hate to give it to a borderline Nazi sympathizer like Pat Buchanan, but it does look like he's the recipient of the latest rarely given "Intellectually Honest Conservative" Award as occasionally bestowed by the BRAD BLOG. And the republic gently weeps.

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