Interesting you should mention the Heritage Foundation. I posted this on another thread, but here's a quote from a May 2004 Post article about the CPA cronyism:

"For months they [junior CPA staff] wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation..."

And let's not forget what happened to John Hulsman, the Heritage guy who had the temerity to criticize Bush about the Iraq War. Fired.

Small world, eh.

I agree.

Poor Andrew -- a true believer.

He has yet to realize that there were, and still are, no competent conservatives upon whom -- partisanship aside -- Bush could have called upon.

THANK YOU for making this point. I've been boring everyone I know forever with it -- it's not that this crowd is ideologically blind, and incompetent, and corrupt, but that the incompetence and corruption are the inevitable byproducts of the ideology.

When you have contempt for government, you see nothing wrong with doling out the contracts and plum jobs to your buddies, because you literally don't see governing as a legitimate function in the way Americans came to see it in the 20th century. And you see any old hands as adversaries if they dare to point out facts that conflict with your theories. So it's not only unsurprising but in fact all but inevitable that you can't do the job.

I've prayed for years that the Dems would get this and run with it, and thanks to you and some others I've noticed recently, maybe they finally will. It's essential for the health of our system -- indeed, it's the way to ward off the result they want and we fear: that people will just decide government can't work after all. Not true, and demonstrably so (Witt vs. Brownie: compare and contrast).

Put a stake in the heart of the contemporary conservative movement already. Thanks again for putting it together.

Not that I disagree with you, but there is more that needs to be said about this.

Ever since the war with Iraq started, conventional wisdom, both in its mainstream media and centrist Democratic components have let Bush off too easy on this one. Their criticism is that Bush was "too idealistic" in trying to spread democracy in Iraq, "overlooking the difficulty of the job." Bush gets off at worst as a cockeyed idealist, out-of-touch with reality perhaps, but purer in heart than those nasty "realists".

Baloney. Left unexamined in that analysis is the fact that for Bush, the Heritage Foundation, and large swaths of the DLC, "democracy" IS absolute corporate rule, privatization of all government functions. It has no economic content whatever. Democrats have not hit this on ideological grounds. And they should have.

Those Iraqis who did welcome the invasion to overthrow Saddam, no doubt hoped to see a reprise of the Marshall Plan or what happened in Kuwait post-1991. But with this crowd, that was then and and this was now.

It's not enough to hit them for cronyism. The content of that cronyism is equally, if not more important.

I posted about this in an explicitly Libertarian context where I plan to develop my thinking over time. For now I'll just give this first reaction: It's perfectly rational to dislike Big Government and still want to see the roles in government be filled by competent people. That's where the GOP is going wrong.

Ironically they're validating the profoundly negative libertarian view of government! They're making themselves part of the problem by wanting to own government in all its bigness rather than actually doing anything to shrink it.

I mean, how can invading a sovereign nation that poses no threat to US security be remotely considered "small government"? Giving the spoils to people who claim to adhere to a philosophy that there shouldn't be spoils to be gotten is a little self-contradictory. At the end of the day, the fact that these GOP hacks are willing to live off the government teat belies any claims to ideological libertarianism.

Leave the DLC out of it. They are not like that. That's bull.

There was an interesting discussion at Dave Sirota's blog some time back about those of us who dropped away from the Democrats as the party moved to the right and who became progressives with a libertarian streak. Anti-big-government progressives.

The new left libertarianism is probably pretty new and could be politically useful to the party as a weaponsagainst destructive, ideological, scorched-earth "libertarians"of the radical right. Fact is, the radcial right ideologues are not libertarians. Their libertarianism is a costume, about as authentic as Bush's boots. I'm guessing, but I think what may have enaabled libertarianism on the left has been technology, allowing all kinds of us middle-class lefties to wander off into areas of the country where we are more independent and more rural and self-sufficient and self-employed but still plugged-in, tenacious lefties. Lefties who are fed to the gills with the Democratic Party.

On the left, the libertarian ingredient is much more like a reform movement, one which says our federal government has been losing muscle and developing fat after more than 50 years of living in sin with corporate power and money. Take back a lean, effective government no longer driven by corporations to assist in their manipulation and use of people. If you talk to people here in the Great Plains about intrusions into privacy, they don't make distinctions between credit card companies and the NSA, their insurance company and the IRS. It's all one great intrusive, undignified, greedy horror fueling a "get out of my life" attitude.

The discussion at Sirota's blog drifted away inconclusively as so often happens. I'd love to see a discussion start up in these precincts about libertarianism on the left and what it could mean in terms of adding energy to a cohesive movement which knows how to govern.

Left libertarianism is a fascinating idea. Now, when I first got involved in politics in the late sixties and early seventies, I went through the requisite phase of reading Atlas Shrugged cover-to-cover, ignoring sleep and breaking only for meals-with-book. For a time, I went around looking for steely-eyed women named Dagny. As it was, I met my first wife at a Young Republican meeting -- essentially a purely social organization -- and she was attracted to me (I assume for other reasons as well) because I was the only person at the party that knew what a libertarian was.

I found myself identifying with both the Ripon Society people, and the random groups of Frank Meyer "fusionists". The fusionists rejected the generally anarcho-libertarians who probably couldn't get elected dogcatcher, and wouldn't even try as cat herder. While they were strong on individual liberties and a fair free market, they also felt a need for a strong national security system.

What that last meant, however, is quite different from the present Administration's concept. Remember, strategic arms limitation talks were just beginning, and Mutually Assured Destruction, with some R&D expenditure, was a real stabilizing element. We had started learning the lessons of a chaotic land war in Asia, with no real objectives. Out of that war, we did get a lot of special operations experience that did survive.

Originally, I planned to be a physician specializing in infectious disease, but life doesn't always work the way you planned. I was able to get some background in microbiology and biochemistry, which served me well with a couple of defense contractors, prior to the Chenical and Biological Weapons Conventions. This led me to more of an interest in public health epidemiology, and convinced me, going back to the Fusionist idea of a secure nation, that a healthy public, universal care, and protected electronic health records that could be examined statistically was the only way to detect covert bioterrorism.

I did have training in strategic intelligence analysis and communications, and did some policy work dealing both with security classification and credit reporting. Frankly, I've been amazed that NSA has been talked into something like the programs being run; there was an organizational phobia of domestic involvement. So, from several viewpoints, including medical privacy, credit reporting, and intelligence collection, yes, I do get that "get out of my life" feeling.

I hope this discussion can go somewhere.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I'd like to see us ask some questions about the fears and aspirations of the people we educated lefties feel guiltiest about and most obsessed with, and those are the groups of economically and socially disadvantaged who are trapped by their circumstances. From white and non-white inner-city youth and elderly to jobless rural people, they too want a piece of the world, a piece of the country, without government and corporate intrusions. I did some one-person assistance to a variety of urban homeless people a few years back and they hated the good-will institutions trying to help them. And I have to admit, pretty much everything those government + private-funded NGO's and government agencies were trying to do were well-intentioned and completely without understanding. That's why the Bush church initiatives have been successful, at least in concept. The churches are better at treating people as individuals, with dignity, and without the homeless feel as though they're now "on a list" or "being watched and judged" or treated "as though we're all the same."

As for the many interesting recent discussions about the common interests of liberals and libertarians (one of which is happening in this thread), I find them very heartening; they point in a very healthy direction for the body politic, one that most people I know would be quite comfortable with. Wish I had time to elaborate further right now; I'll check in to see if this thread's still live later today...

Good luck in November. It would be great to take back the House (Senate too). It would also be very nice to see more Southern states represented in the Democratic Caucus.

I want to point out that what is being described is not a business model. It's a scam; plain and simple. As a democrat and a business person I take offense when the president is referred to as the MBA president, or this whitehouse is associated with how businesses are run. Likewise, it's a broad brush stroke that paints all business, big and small, as part of the Bush-Cheney conspiracy to ruin America.

Should you get elected (and my fingers are crossed for you) try partnering with business where and when it makes a sense and enhances your district. Good paying jobs and responsible corporate citizenship can make a huge difference in how communities grow and prosper.

For every Ken Lay there are hundreds of honorable business professionals. Just remember that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Transparency in business and government is at the heart of good governance and a healthy economy.

Again, best of luck. I'll put you on my watch list.

Regards.

Great comments both...

Aside from the obvious angles of cronyism and incompetence and the whole Iraq misadventure as an indictment of ideology/ideologues in general, it seems to me the main point that is being lost here is the indictment of conservative principles. Period.

As a result of neo-con ideology instigating the Iraq misadventure... And the subsequent conservative cronyism program that placed ideology above experience in the rebuilding efforts of the CPA... By putting their dream team in place, conservatives were given the perfect laboratory for their entire platform.

And it failed miserably.

The Bush administration was confident that they would create a democracy in their own image: a conservative paradise. And they failed not just because of incompetence and idiocy. They failed because the conservative agenda doomed them to failure. They failed because the conservative ideology is unworkable because it is based on fantasy and magical thinking.

The story of the disaster of Iraq should be told as the story of the death knell of conservatism.

Pick up the mallet and sound the gong.

Honestly, I have yet to find one consistent thread in the Bush Administration, other than audacious criminality. In the first term I honestly struggled trying to wrap my mind around the many odd and inconsistent choices that were made. I tried to objectively put the pieces together, whether I agreed with them or not (not), into some kind of logic or philosophy.

There was the Christian right thing. There was the Grover Norquist “taxes as holocaust” thing. There was the imperial presidency thing. The business connection. The energy connection. Etc.

None of it was cohesive. The only explanation was that the president was weak and was surrounded by many competing conservative pet projects. This idea of the whitehouse as frat house was just too silly to be entertained. But no future action ever brought the pieces together into a political philosophy. Sadly I came to understand, around year 3, that it was a frat house, that it was only about power, and that the pet projects and associated part of the base were running the show, and that a lot of unscrupulous bastards were getting rich from it. The president is okay with this, just so long as they keep their part of the bargain: raise money, get out their vote, suppress the other side’s vote, and steal elections when the aforementioned three failed.

I resigned to the fact that a banana republic had taken up residence in the whitehouse. I think that the absurdity of the reality is the reason why the press seems to “go along” or give the administration a “pass.” The reality is so surreal that to just write about it would invite eye rolling.

The only "conservatives" for whom the Bush Administration would constitute the dream team are pseudocons (a/k/a plain ol' cons). I grant you that their tomfoolery is most of what passes for conservatism these days, but it wasn't always thus.

And no, I didn't just discover that Bush was profoundly unconservative. I had my doubts as early as the Patriot Act, and by spring 2004 I had concluded that this lot was totally unfit to govern. I'm glad other conservatives are suddenly finding religion (*cough* figuratively) but I've been telling everyone this gang isn't conservative for years now.