Bush-bashing on the rise within GOPBy Dick Polman
Knight Ridder NewspapersWASHINGTON — Conservatives love to quote Ronald Reagan at every opportunity, to invoke him as the exemplar of their ideology. But in their winter of discontent, many on the right are breaching Reagan's 11th commandment, which decrees that no Republican shall ever speak ill of another.
And the target of their ire is President Bush.
At the dawn of a crucial election year — and with all the polls indicating that the Democrats are poised to make gains in the House and Senate — the Bush White House is banking on a big, enthusiastic conservative turnout in November. But that will happen only if the Bush base calls a halt to its Bush bashing.
The bashing has been intense in recent days. Commentator Jonah Goldberg, miffed that Bush has piled up record deficits and boosted the size of government, writes that Bush "is spending money like a pimp with a week to live." Another, Fox News analyst Tony Snow, says that Bush's decision to shelve his Social Security privatization plan is "an act of surrender." Yet another, former Reagan domestic-policy adviser Bruce Bartlett, is releasing a book this month titled "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."
The vibes here late last week at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) were particularly toxic. Normally, the thousands who attend spend most of their time trying to ensure that liberalism is a dirty word in American politics. This year was different.
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