When George W. Bush addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2008, I criticized the conservatives gathered for deluding themselves into believing that George W. Bush was one of them. George W. Bush, we now definitively discover, shared my view. "What is this movement you keep talking about in the speech?" he asked speechwriter Matt Latimer, who had been tasked with devising the president's CPAC address. "[T]ake out all this movement stuff. There is no movement." Indeed, there wasn't. The "conservative movement" Bush sought to delete from his speech had in fact been deleted from existence shortly after he had taken the oath of office. There was something masochistic in the CPAC audience chanting "Four more years!" at a president who had trampled over their favored polices. Big government at home and abroad, amnesty for foreigners breaking into the country, the "veto" power missing in action for more than five years, bailouts for Wall Street, Detroit, and Baghdad, and a new department to add to the federal bureaucracy are the painful legacies of the Bush years. "Abuse me more!" was how I interpreted that mindless mantra. George W. Bush seemed to have interpreted that way too. "Look, I know this probably sounds arrogant to say," the president remarked to his speechwriter, "but I redefined the Republican Party."

Yeah, I guess he did redefine the Republican Party to an extent. And helped turn it into something like what the Democrat Party used to be before it too devolved and went way left.

Before? Try after.

I thought the Examiner was a liberal rag? Perhaps they've changed ownership.

Perhaps deconstruct would be a more apt verb. You can read Steve Hayward's The Age of Reagan to see just how total a dismantling job he did. Going from Reagan to Bush reminds of Mort Sahl's old line about going from the Founders to Nixon: "What does this prove? Darwin was wrong!"

I love the quote, Mal!

I guess that W forgot that when it comes to federal bailouts, one is too many and a thousand is never enough.