Why conservatives must reject Bush
Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the conservative CATO institute and former special assistant to President Reagan, claims that President Bush presents the following challenge to conservatives:
Do they believe in anything other than power? Are they serious about their rhetoric on limited, constitutionally restrained government?
Take, for example, the conservative value of balanced budgets and restrained federal spending:
In 2000 candidate Bush complained that Al Gore would "throw the budget out of balance." But the big-spending Bush administration and GOP Congress have turned a 10-year budget surplus once estimated at $5.6 trillion into an estimated $5 trillion flood of red ink. This year's deficit will run about $445 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation reports that in 2003 "government spending exceeded $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II." There are few programs at which the president has not thrown money; he has supported massive farm subsidies, an expensive new Medicare drug benefit, thousands of pork barrel projects, dubious homeland security grants, an expansion of Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, and new foreign aid programs. What's more, says former conservative Republican Rep. Bob Barr, "in the midst of the war on terror and $500 billion deficits, [Bush] proposes sending spaceships to Mars."
Unfortunately, even the official spending numbers understate the problem. The Bush administration is pushing military proposals that may understate defense costs by $500 billion over the coming decade. The administration lied about the likely cost of the Medicare drug benefit, which added $8 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Moreover, it declined to include in budget proposals any numbers for maintaining the occupation of Iraq or underwriting the war on terrorism. Those funds will come through supplemental appropriation bills. Never mind that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had promised that reconstruction of Iraq could be paid for with Iraqi resources. (Yet, despite the Bush administration's generosity, it could not find the money to expeditiously equip U.S. soldiers in Iraq with body armor.)
If you have a conservative friend or family member who supports Bush, please share the article with him. It is one thing for a conservative to think that Kerry would be worse than Bush -- Bandow happens to think it's a comparison between not so good (Kerry) and "catastrophic" (Bush). It's quite another to see the cultish devotion to Bush among some supposed conservatives. It cannot be grounded in any ordinary understanding of conservative values.
8:30:24 PM 
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