I wondered what Andrew Sullivan’s point about Bush and big-government conservatism was last week. Ramesh Ponnuru has responded to his post in a similar manner:

His thought experiment, meanwhile, is thoughtless. For it to begin to work, his President Al Gore would have had to have overthrown the Baathist regime in Iraq, enacted Health Savings Accounts, cut taxes, proposed a free-market reform of Social Security, nominated conservative judges, and so forth. (There have been more conservative policy achievements under this president than there were at the height of Gingrich’s revolution, a fact which certainly tempers my nostalgia for it.) Is Sullivan really suggesting that opposing Bush and backing John Kerry would have been the truly conservative thing to do in the last election? Oh right: That is what Sullivan thought. Now he’s complaining that NR refused to join him in his folly.

I wondered what Andrew Sullivan’s point about Bush and big-government conservatism was last week. Ramesh Ponnuru has responded to his post in a similar manner:

His thought experiment, meanwhile, is thoughtless. For it to begin to work, his President Al Gore would have had to have overthrown the Baathist regime in Iraq, enacted Health Savings Accounts, cut taxes, proposed a free-market reform of Social Security, nominated conservative judges, and so forth. (There have been more conservative policy achievements under this president than there were at the height of Gingrich’s revolution, a fact which certainly tempers my nostalgia for it.) Is Sullivan really suggesting that opposing Bush and backing John Kerry would have been the truly conservative thing to do in the last election? Oh right: That is what Sullivan thought. Now he’s complaining that NR refused to join him in his folly.

I wondered what Andrew Sullivan’s point about Bush and big-government conservatism was last week. Ramesh Ponnuru has responded to his post in a similar manner:

His thought experiment, meanwhile, is thoughtless. For it to begin to work, his President Al Gore would have had to have overthrown the Baathist regime in Iraq, enacted Health Savings Accounts, cut taxes, proposed a free-market reform of Social Security, nominated conservative judges, and so forth. (There have been more conservative policy achievements under this president than there were at the height of Gingrich’s revolution, a fact which certainly tempers my nostalgia for it.) Is Sullivan really suggesting that opposing Bush and backing John Kerry would have been the truly conservative thing to do in the last election? Oh right: That is what Sullivan thought. Now he’s complaining that NR refused to join him in his folly.

Kathleen Antrim says that Michael Moore’s former manager doesn’t have kind words for him:

With characteristic zeal, Moore campaigned vigorously for a Best Picture nomination.

“He was at every Oscar party and screening,” said Moore’s former manager Douglas Urbanski, a critically acclaimed 25-year veteran of the entertainment industry most recently known for the movie “The Contender,” starring Gary Oldman, Joan Allen and Jeff Bridges. “He took out full-page ads, cut his hair, bathed and even wore a suit. [Moore was] very present around town.”

Emphasis mine. Apparently, Hollywood is blaming him for Kerry’s defeat. And then there’s this:

…he feels no compunction in talking about the only client he ever fired. And he fired Moore with a ten-page letter.

“A more dishonest and demented person I have never met,” Urbanski wrote me in an e-mail, “and I have known a few! And he is more money obsessed than any I have known, and that’s saying a lot.”

Urbanski believes that Moore hates America, hates capitalism, and hates any normal concept of freedom and democracy. This seems odd considering that if it weren’t for America, freedom and capitalism, Moore’s brand of expression and capitalistic success would be impossible, if not illegal. “Michael Moore could not withstand

Mark Steyn says that Europe is set to implode:

Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment’s notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you’ll be walking with a limp after two hours: It’s 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It’s full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn’t in the least bit constitutional. That’s to say, it’s not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that’s got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ”mohair subsidy” and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ”We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around.” If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard’s constitution.

Maybe Bush’s decision to endorse the EU this week was just his way of hurrying things along.

Andrew Sullivan complains about a supposed double standard among conservatives and the staff at the National Review in particular:

Ponnuru argues…that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies….Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office…I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

I guess I fail to see the point. Obviously, they would work to remove a Democrat (and particularly Al Gore) had he followed those same policies. Because he would have no redeeming virtues.

Look, I would have loved to fire George Bush for all those things, but there was no way to do that without replacing him with someone who would almost certainly be even worse on almost all of those issues, and who was unserious about our defense as well. There were no conservatives on offer in this past election on domestic economic issues.

Does Andrew really believe that if the folks at The National Review aren’t actively trying to remove Bush from office (to be replaced with…what, exactly?) that they cannot claim to be conservatives? Sorry, but makes no sense at all. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you work with the president you have, not the one you wish you had.

Andrew Sullivan complains about a supposed double standard among conservatives and the staff at the National Review in particular:

Ponnuru argues…that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies….Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office…I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

I guess I fail to see the point. Obviously, they would work to remove a Democrat (and particularly Al Gore) had he followed those same policies. Because he would have no redeeming virtues.

Look, I would have loved to fire George Bush for all those things, but there was no way to do that without replacing him with someone who would almost certainly be even worse on almost all of those issues, and who was unserious about our defense as well. There were no conservatives on offer in this past election on domestic economic issues.

Does Andrew really believe that if the folks at The National Review aren’t actively trying to remove Bush from office (to be replaced with…what, exactly?) that they cannot claim to be conservatives? Sorry, but makes no sense at all. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you work with the president you have, not the one you wish you had.

Andrew Sullivan complains about a supposed double standard among conservatives and the staff at the National Review in particular:

Ponnuru argues…that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies….Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office…I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

I guess I fail to see the point. Obviously, they would work to remove a Democrat (and particularly Al Gore) had he followed those same policies. Because he would have no redeeming virtues.

Look, I would have loved to fire George Bush for all those things, but there was no way to do that without replacing him with someone who would almost certainly be even worse on almost all of those issues, and who was unserious about our defense as well. There were no conservatives on offer in this past election on domestic economic issues.

Does Andrew really believe that if the folks at The National Review aren’t actively trying to remove Bush from office (to be replaced with…what, exactly?) that they cannot claim to be conservatives? Sorry, but makes no sense at all. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you work with the president you have, not the one you wish you had.

The Yalta summit was sixty years ago today. The Germans had been defeated in the Battle of the Bulge a couple weeks before, and the end of the Nazi regime was clearly only weeks or at most months away. Much of the damage of that conference was undone in the late eighties, as the Wall came down. But Arthur Herman says that President Bush should (as he implied in his inaugural address) finish the job.

Via Instapundit, Joshua Claybourn is cynical and pessimistic about the prospects for cutting farm subsidies. While I’m not optimistic, his pessimism, at least as stated, seems unjustified on two counts.

First, not to use an argument from non-authority, but quoting Atrios is hardly likely to be persuasive to any thinking person….

But more to the point, Atrios’ “argument” (such as it is) is flaccid:

…I predict that the most likely result of this attempt to cut farm spending is precisely what happened in 2002 when Bush also proposed cutting farm subsidies. A bill will pass which significantly increases farm subsidies, at which point Bush will sign it and praise it.

Well, not to sound too trite, but that was then, and this is now. 2002 was an election year, in which Congress was up for grabs, and the president still had a reelection of his own coming up. He also had less support in both houses of Congress than he does today.

It appears to me that the president, having been reelected and having to worry no more about having to win another election, has decided to cut back on the “compassionate conservatism” (for which read standard liberalism and government growth, but not quite as fast) and try to make up for past sins in his second term (on a number of fronts, not just farm subsidies). I suppose it’s possible that he’ll end up signing and praising an increase in agriwelfare, but the politics of it this year make it seem unlikely. He may not get what he wants, but I’m guessing that he’ll at least threaten a veto to attempt to, and if he doesn’t, he won’t praise it this time.