"DON'T LET THEM GET AWAY"

Richard Viguerie, writing in Sunday's Washington Post, penned a piece entitled "Bush Base Betrayal." The gist of this attempted no mea culpa reads as follows:

"As a candidate in 2000, George W. Bush was a Rorschach test. Country Club Republicans saw him as another George H.W. Bush; some conservatives, thinking wishfully, saw him as another Ronald Reagan. He called himself a 'compassionate conservative,' which meant whatever one wanted it to mean. Experts from across the party's spectrum were flown to Austin to brief Bush and reported back: 'He's one of us.'

Republicans were desperate to retake the White House(HAH! ABOUT THE ONLY GERM OF TRUTH IN THIS WHOLE ARTICLE!), conservatives were desperate to get the Clinton liberals out and there was no direct heir to Reagan running for president. So most conservatives supported Bush as the strongest candidate -- some enthusiastically and some, like me, reluctantly. After the disastrous presidency of his father, our support for the son was a triumph of hope over experience.

Once he took office, conservatives were willing to grant this Bush a honeymoon. (Anyone you know have a 5 1/2 year long honeymoon? Living here in the land which discovered no-fault Divorce, LOST is well acquainted with many whose marriages did not last that long) We were happy when he proposed tax cuts (small, but tax cuts nonetheless) and when he pushed for a missile defense system. Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and conservatives came to see support for the president as an act of patriotism."

Spin all you want, Mr. Viguerie. You and your entire party married this guy, in an act of pure political polygamy, you brought him, his cronies, his oil buddies, and his uncontrollable entourage of unsavory characters from the seediest patch of people who worked in the Reagan White House. They've abused you, us, the entire country. It will take years to undo the damage they have wrought on our finances, our military readiness and morale, our infrastructure, our environment and our standing in the world. No, you cannot claim this was a short interlude and a grudging realization, you all embraced this and you're all to blame for it, for sacrificing objectively rational policy and financial analysis on the altar of political partisanship. Shame on you for the first screw up, and to hell with you for trying to shift the blame and resposibility elsewhere.

But, this is only one guy's opinion, right? Is that what you're saying? Well, not exactly. Here in the land of Moonbeam, granola and Mickey Mouse, it is primary season. ALL of the Repub candidates are slathering open fences and fields with their patriotic red white and blue signage, and the vast majority of 'em are adding tag lines like "Conservative Republican" as if the ones already in Washington, Sacramento or the Council Chambers were dimestore forgeries, or worse, Democrats in Republican cloth coat clothing. Whether any of these wannabe leaders are or aren't conservative Republicans is really not the issue. The burning question is really after all of the lies of Bush-Cheney on everything from the Rx drug bill, to Katrina, the No Child Left Behind Act and to the D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R in Iraq why the hell should anyone trust you with their votes?