... It's open season on the Bush Administration, and lately some of the most heated salvos have been coming from the right. In a much discussed speech delivered in Washington recently, Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff at the State Department from 2001 to '05, assailed the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that has hijacked US foreign policy, saying, "The case that I saw over four-plus years was a case I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process." In the latest New Yorker former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft is no less damning, saying of Iraq, "This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism."
...the mounting criticism also reflects a growing realization that the principles for which conservatism is supposed to stand--limited government, fiscal responsibility, prudence, restraint--are nowhere evident in this Administration's record. As conservative economist and columnist Bruce Bartlett put it in a recent Washington Times editorial, "The truth is now dawning on many movement conservatives that George W. Bush is not one of them and never has been."
...exporting democracy through the barrel of a gun with little regard for history or cultural differences is messianic and radical, not conservative; deficit hawks who pointed out that cutting taxes during a war is the height of recklessness, not fiscal responsibility; and libertarians who watched in disgust as the Administration lavished subsidies on the energy, pharmaceutical, sugar and cotton industries while claiming it championed small government (a notion that in reality seems to be applied only to the poor and vulnerable). When people like former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke dared to point some of these things out, they were dismissed as traitors or closet liberals with axes to grind by the same conservative media that now make room for White House critics.
...regardless of what some Republicans suddenly experiencing second thoughts might wish. That the C-word, conservatism, is increasingly associated with others, like "cronyism" and "corruption," of course, might not seem to everyone to be such a bad thing.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051114/pressThe "C-word", I like that.
How about "cabal" and "Corporatism" too?
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