They Second the Motion

A few days ago, I briefly commented on Global George's public abandonment of conservatism in his speech before the UN.

That speech, combined with his address to the nation regarding Hurricane relief, has caused others to chime in along the same line of discussion.

Vox Day, in his weekly WND column, foresees the collapse of the Republicans as the party of conservatives.

President Bush's recent speech on his administration's planned long-term response to Hurricane Katrina marked an interesting point in the continued devolution of American conservatism. Whereas his first five years had previously been a strange combination of strategic Wilsonian foreign policy and tactical Keynesian domestic policy, the president managed to make it abundantly clear that in domestic terms, his presidential guiding light is Lyndon Baines Johnson, not Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Real conservatives now understand they have been betrayed – badly – by this fraudulent man. Compassionate conservatism, as it turns out, is simply another name for Great Society liberalism, and not even the Texas swagger is original. Genuinely conservative Republicans are dismayed by the president's unveiling of his core liberalism and rightly fear for the future of a party which has likely seen its high-water mark already.

Pat Buchanan asks the question: "Is George Bush a conservative at all?"

At the United Nations, writes the Washington Post's Colum Lynch, Bush "linked his campaign against terrorism to the anti-poverty agenda advanced by other nations, although he shied away from adopting some of the specific commitments sought by allies."
For one of those commitments, agreed to at the Millennium Summit in Monterey, Mexico, in 2000, was that America should commit 0.7 percent of its GNP to foreign aid.

That would be $100 billion each year from Uncle Sam, sent to Third World regimes, the United Nations and the international aid agencies.
Yet, Bush clearly believes poverty and terror are inextricably tied. "We must help raise up the failing states that provide fertile ground for the terrorists," said Bush, and "change the conditions that allow terrorists to flourish."

But where is the hard historical evidence that people turn to terror because of poverty? Almost all of today's terrorists are young men who could easily make their way in the world. When has any of them blown himself up to demand an increase in foreign aid or to protest the plight of the African poor?

At the United Nations, Bush repeated another of his unproven assumptions. "Bush used his speech," writes the Post's Glenn Kessler, "to explain why ... democracy thwarts the growth of terrorism."

But if democracy thwarts terror, why did terrorists strike Britain, Spain, Russia and the United States? If democracy is the antidote to terror, why was there not one terror attack inside Iraq under the dictator Saddam? Yet, with Iraq free, we can get a dozen terror attacks in Baghdad in a day.

Its a beautiful thing when WaMi, Day and Buchanan write and agree on the same subject.
Take the time to read them both.