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Monday, May 10, 2004

Shorter "Conservatives Restive About Bush Policies" by Dana Milbank and Jonathan Weisman

Conservatives agree Paul Krugman was right.

In the plece of Paul Krugman you could put the liberal blogger of your choice.

Now Milbank is no Bush fan, but the weird thing about this article is how few (quoted) conservatives are willing to claim that Bush has not been right wing enough. One exception is "Michael Franc, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, ... "" Conservative intellectuals "are saying, 'Don't do things half way,' " he said."

However, he seems to be the only conservativ saying any such thing.

The views of other conservatives (parahrased by Milbank and Weisman) echo the left blogosphere echo chamber

"ideas are hatched in the White House, for political or ideological reasons, then are thrust on the bureaucracy, "not for analysis, but for sale," Bartlett said."

"In Iraq, you don't see the thinking, 'Things have not happened as we had planned. What do we do now?' " said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute"

"Richard W. Rahn, ... in a Washington Times column April 30 along similar lines. "From the beginning of the Bush administration, sympathetic, experienced economists have warned its officials about the need to avoid some obvious mistakes," he wrote. "Unfortunately, these warnings have gone unheeded." "

"David Frum said Rove is "the top hack and the top wonk" in the White House.""

Frum is an exception as he doesn't consider this a problem. Evidently he has confidence in Rove's deep understanding of economics, military strategy, diplomacy and Iraq.

The thesis that Bush administration policy is based on ideology and short term political advantage and not on messy facts or tedious analysis is, to say the least, not stunningly original.

I don't suppose we can hope to hear conservatives to admit that they are admitting that liberals were right all along. However we can watch them squirm.

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