Ladies and Gentlemen, Jonah Goldberg is ON FIRE today... Here he is in
Townhall:
[D]uring an election year the differences between conservatives and Republicans - as well as those between liberals and Democrats - become especially blurred. That's because elections force everyone to choose sides, to make the achievable good preferable to the unattainable perfect. Antiwar liberals held their noses and voted for Kerry even though he promised to fight harder than Bush. Small government conservatives contained their disgust for Bush's overspending.
But now the election is over, and I think you can expect to see a lot more daylight between conservatives and Bush. By all accounts, Bush and Karl Rove want to seal the Republican Party as the majority for a generation. I'm all for it, but that doesn't mean I'll like everything the White House does to achieve this. The No Child Left Behind Act was a deliberate attempt to steal education from Democrats as an issue. It was somewhat successful, but that doesn't mean conservatives should suddenly cheer federal meddling in local education. The expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs was a fiscal train wreck.
The White House has many excellent ideas - tax reform, overhauling Social Security, etc. - that conservatives should get behind. But if the goal is to make the Republican Party the majority party by making it the a more "reasonable" big government party, I suspect you won't find it so easy to confuse conservatives and Republicans in the near future.
I find this particularly relevant in regards to the
Arlen Specter "problem" outlined below...
Islamofascism Delenda Est!
Current Arafat Status:
