In a Q&A with Washington Post readers to discuss his book Family of Secrets, Russ Baker responded to a question about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney by writing: "I would question whether either man was a real conservative. They are, more accurately, corporatists, and comfortable with tilting the playing field for their friends. Real conservatives are highly principled, and believe in a fair shake based on performance. What we have seen, time and again, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina response and elsewhere was that their friends and cronies got contracts, then ended up over-billing and doing a poor job."

Baker's reply, like his book as a whole, fails to adequately recognize the deep connections between the ideas of the modern conservative movement about governing and the countless failures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Those ideas to a large extent were developed and propagated for decades with the funding of the corporate interests and well-connected Republicans of the sort Baker fixates on. But it's neglecting a central part of the story to leave out the arguments that Bush, Cheney, and pretty much every conservative Republican made from Reagan onward about how government was the central problem, how privatizing and contracting out public services would lead to greater efficiencies, how government "bureaucrats" were inherently incompetent, how tax cuts for the rich would make everyone better off, how regulations kill jobs and should therefore be subverted, and how militarism would make the country safer. Russ refers in his opening post to those policies as "radical," but they also were long advocated by most mainstream conservatives.

The Bush administration's policies without question benefited the corporate benefactors and allies that Baker focuses on. But there was nothing "secret" about any of that. Bush was pursuing an agenda that conservative politicians, quite openly and energetically, claimed would pave the road toward a better, more prosperous, safer America.

Baker devotes considerable attention to the conversion of FEMA from one of the most highly effective federal agencies under Bill Clinton and James Lee Witt to the horror show we all witnessed after Hurricane Katrina. But that dismantling occurred because Joe Allbaugh followed the conservative playbook for government reform: bypass career civil servants through the appointment of like-minded political appointees, privatize services to purportedly more efficient outside contractors, devolve responsibilities to states, and cut wherever possible -- including previously successful programs. All of that was supposed to make FEMA more cost-effective. But as many progressives warned long before Katrina hit, those policies (in addition to shifting the agency from Cabinet status to the Department of Homeland Security morass) were decimating FEMA. Similar processes occurred throughout the government, as the conservative movement applauded, to comparably catastrophic effect.

What the book leaves out is that Bush and Allbaugh weren't just acting in ways that would help their buddies -- they were carrying out a right-wing agenda that was built on dubious claims that had been sold with great effectiveness to the public for a long time. The right's wealthy funders knew they would reap personal financial rewards while advancing their mission of weakening government from the ideas they pushed, but their political pitch always emphasized that the public as a whole would benefit as well.

To say that Bush and Cheney are not real conservatives lets modern conservatism completely off the hook for the enormous damage its ideas and belief system inflicted on the country. The failures of the right's ideology mostly happened right out in the open, where everyone could see.