Peggy Noonan appears to have recently eaten of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil:
This week’s column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?
The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised. I’d recently written on the subject and thought it significant that no one disagreed with my criticism. Everyone murmured about new programs, new costs, how the president “spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money.” And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?
That’s not what I understood him to mean. If I’d thought he was a big-spending Rockefeller Republican–that is, if I’d thought he was a man who could not imagine and had never absorbed the damage big spending does–I wouldn’t have voted for him.
I’m no conservative, but I can answer that question. Yes, Virginia, I did know him to be a liberal in terms of spending. I did not vote for him, nor will I vote for the sacrificial lamb the Republicans offer up in 2008.
Voting is a sham, and if you cannot understand that after six years of the pig in the poke that is Bush the Younger, you simply aren’t paying attention.