Monday, December 04, 2006
Glasnost II
Rich Lowry writes: "you should put your faith in principles not in men. It was always weird that so many conservatives stayed so vested in Rumsfeld—mostly because they liked his style and he was attacked by the left".
Admittedly, Lowry is writing (in a flip-flop) that we need to put more troops in Iraq. He's wrong because chaos is too far ahead of us now, and the president is considering adding 20,000 troops, which is not enough to do anything but prolong the agony for Iraq and for US servicemen.
But at least the Republican commentariat seems to be coming to a recognition that there is such a thing as principles, which might be worth defending over cults of personality, in some circumstances.
Partisanship, like nationalism, blinds us to the flaws of our own side. As things are, because Republicans shied away from honest assessment of his actions, they will be struggling to distance themselves from the disasterous domestic and foreign policy of the Bush administration for at least a decade.
A party winds up getting judged on its actions, not its principles. "Small government conservative" is an oxymoron to people under 30.
The incompetence of the Bush administration-- coupled with the unprincipled acquiescence of the conservative commentariat-- may have ceded some principles, such as cognizance of our own limitations in fiscal and foreign policy, that Republicans mostly defended for a half century prior to the Bush administration.
Admittedly, Lowry is writing (in a flip-flop) that we need to put more troops in Iraq. He's wrong because chaos is too far ahead of us now, and the president is considering adding 20,000 troops, which is not enough to do anything but prolong the agony for Iraq and for US servicemen.
But at least the Republican commentariat seems to be coming to a recognition that there is such a thing as principles, which might be worth defending over cults of personality, in some circumstances.
Partisanship, like nationalism, blinds us to the flaws of our own side. As things are, because Republicans shied away from honest assessment of his actions, they will be struggling to distance themselves from the disasterous domestic and foreign policy of the Bush administration for at least a decade.
A party winds up getting judged on its actions, not its principles. "Small government conservative" is an oxymoron to people under 30.
The incompetence of the Bush administration-- coupled with the unprincipled acquiescence of the conservative commentariat-- may have ceded some principles, such as cognizance of our own limitations in fiscal and foreign policy, that Republicans mostly defended for a half century prior to the Bush administration.
