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Free Liberal: Coordinating towards higher values

Free Liberal

Coordinating towards higher values

Manchurian Cronyism

Jonah Goldberg's recent column is food for thought. While he covers a lot of the current waterfront pretty well, here's another interpretation:

Bush is fundamentally a cronyist. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he can't really connect with the regular folks like Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan did, for instance. Politics is in his lineage, with both his Dad and Granddad having been pols.

When he ran in 2000 for president, I have to admit I considered voting for him. He sounded a bit Reaganesque, with an adjustment. He hammered away at the notion of "compassionate conservative." While I wasn't exactly sure WHAT he meant by that, I have a bit of an egalitarian streak in me. Big Government's especially bad for the poor, IMO, but unwinding the state in a selective fashion that does less harm to the poor in the short run just makes a lot of sense to me.

Still, I'd always assumed Bush 43 would be like Bush 41: Give them just enough red-meat, small government conservatism to get elected, and then turn around and be a corporate statist, doling out perks and special deals to their golfing buddies. Corporate statists need to hide their intentions, because their unreconstructed plutocracy simply doesn't fly in the ballot box. 43 even went so far as to adopt a somewhat cutting-edge Social Security reform that's been kicking around in free market (yet non-corporate-statist) circles for 20 years. I've come to believe that this was never real for W, but rather his way of addressing his Dad's malady: A lack of "the vision thing," as 41 once (inadvertently) admitted was a flaw of his.

W does a much better down-home thing than 41, so I almost fell for it.

But, now, with his nearly unflagging resolve, the past 4 years have seen W time and time again play Warlord, doling out the goodies first to his buddies, then to his enemies (to mollify them, I suspect). It's almost a tribal thing with him. What doesn't go to his buddies or enemies, his other policies resemble a poor example of noblesse oblige, bordering on a let-them-eat cake routine. Witness his slow response to Hurricane Katrina, and praising former FEMA Director Brownie, as he called him, as he would in the country club locker room.

43 was always the Manchurian Candidate, programmed from birth. When he smirks at us, the programming has failed, not unlike his Dad looking down at his watch during the debates in '92.

I wish these people would go away. How many yachts, country club memberships, and vacation homes do they really need?

-Robert Capozzi



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