RALL IS RIGHT:

GEORGE W. BUSH, LIBERAL: Sometimes Right-Wing Doesn't Mean Conservative (Ted Rall, 12/03/02)

By every measure, Bush the Younger has pursed an agenda that attacks everything conservatism stands for--looking out for America first, smaller government, lower taxes, balancing the budget, respecting privacy rights. Even the neoconservatives who took over the GOP's ideological base during the 1980s--defined in the Dorsey Dictionary of American Politics and Government as opposed to "government regulation of personal behavior in areas of morality, school prayer, abortion and so on"--have been left out in the cold. [...]

Hoover, Eisenhower and Goldwater were conservatives. George W. Bush is not. He's a radical right-winger applying selective liberalism in order to create an expansionist military empire centered around an oppressive police state.

Bush has given us the worst of both political worlds: the wasteful tax-and-spend big government of wild-eyed liberalism without any of the compassion or desire for justice that normally goes along with bleeding-heart bureaucracy; the most tyrannical aspects of right-wing demagoguery--scapegoating, depriving people of basic rights, domestic spying, warmongering--without any of the positive attributes that usually accompany it, such as attention to reducing waste and balancing the budget.

We Americans need both liberals and conservatives to lead us. But a government run by right-wing liberals will lead us into a world of trouble.

I'm sorry I can't remember who first said it (if you do recall, please let me know) but the Far Left and Far Right have reached the point where their beliefs overlap to a startling degree. Except for the silliness about government's ability to improve the lot of the poor, Mr. Rall sounds here like one of the anti-war libertarians/paleocons. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 4, 2002 9:11 PM