Over at Political Animal, Kevin Drum’s excellent blog, he has pointed to a great article in his magazine, Washington Monthly, by Alan Wolfe. It discusses the sentiment, starting to make the rounds, that even though conservative pundits have begun to attack George W. Bush as not being a “real” conservative, they (the pundits) are simply wrong.

Bush is, of course, a “real” conservative, with other “real” conservatives to both the left and right of him in his party, and they have all been running the White House, Senate, and House for the past 4 years (6 for the WH and Senate). Where has all their “real” conservative power gotten us? A very deep hole: not only in an economic (fiscal) sense, my personal deepest fear, but also with the quagmire that is Iraq, not to mention the disabling or neglect of important government services. The paragraph I would like to highlight from Wolfe’s article is the following:

But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions–indeed, whose very existence–they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.

The American public has been smothered by the conservative beast, and it will take us a long while to get out from underneath. You can find Wolfe’s article here.