The op-ed column by Paul Krugman, available in _The New York Times_ of
3/10/06, seems relevant to the experience of many of us in the Usenet.
In 2000 we certainly wanted to give Mr. Bush a chance, even though we
believed that the Oval Office had been handed to him by some
questionable ativities in Florida and at the United States Supreme
Court. Even when we knew he had paid little attention to
counterterrorism (for which we paid a huge penalty on 9/11) we wished
him well, particularly when he appeared at Ground Zero with his
bullhorn and when he later promised to "smoke out, rund down, and bring
to justice" those who financed and directed those events. Some thought
he should have a chance to test the Utopian fictions of Milton Friedman
in tax and regulatory policies even though we knew that those theories
had earlier helped produce robber barons and depressions.
On Iraq, some of us cheered the easy victory over that country's
armed forces, although we knew that defeating a dictator's despised
military is far different from occupying a land whose people don't want
to be occupied. We excused Mr. Bush's misleading, even false, coupling
of Iraq and 9/11. We knew better but did nothing. Some cheered him on.
A few of us noted, in 2001, that Mr. Bush had removed funding from
SELA, the half-completed 10-year project to strengthen the Gulf Coast
levees in southern Louisiana, particularly the vulnerable 17th Street
Canal levee in New Orleans, and warned about it, but hardly anyone but
Gulf-staters insisted on doing anything about it, and they were called
boondogglers.
In 2004, we allowed the Florida error of 2000 to be repeated in
Ohio, where a Bush campaign co-chairman was in charge of procuring
voting machines (some of whiich turned out to have no paper trail) and
of certifying the vote count.
Finally, Republicans, Congress, and the public seem to have
experienced the epiphany Mr. Krugman discusses. I hope you'll read Mr.
Krugman's column. If you have disliked his views over these five years,
and called him names, you'll find him reporting those names in the
column, in which he notes the changes in the way the Republic Party,
Congress, and the public have viewed the events of these Bush years.
Have we in the political groups in Usenet experienced a similar
epiphany?
--Russ


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New York Times
March 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Conservative Epiphany
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted
America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent
book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush
administration is "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and
"inept."

It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that
"if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald
Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his
ears."

Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what
Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty
much what he's saying now.

Human nature being what it is, I don't expect Mr. Bartlett to
acknowledge his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse
from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke
at the Cato forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the
patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President
Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of
Mr. Bush's policies, but of his personal qualities, too.

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent
epiphanies by conservative commentators who have finally realized that
the Bush administration isn't trustworthy. But we should guard against
a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters,
which says there's something praiseworthy about having initially been
taken in by Mr. Bush's deceptions, even though the administration's
mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says,
as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies
about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been
saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were
unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who
now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this
administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand.
If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent
approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration
exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your
open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the
administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy
theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say
was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the
facts.

Mr. Bartlett's book is mainly a critique of the Bush administration's
fiscal policy. Well, the administration's pattern of fiscal dishonesty
and irresponsibility was clear right from the start to anyone who
understands budget arithmetic. The chicanery that took place during the
selling of the 2001 tax cut - obviously fraudulent budget
projections, transparently deceptive advertising about who would
benefit and the use of blatant accounting gimmicks to conceal the
plan's true cost - was as bad as anything that followed.

The false selling of the Iraq war was almost as easy to spot. All the
supposed evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was discredited before
the war - and it was the threat of nukes, not lesser W.M.D., that
stampeded Congress into authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. The
administration's nonsensical but insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq
and 9/11 was also a dead giveaway that we were being railroaded into an
unnecessary war.

The point is that pundits who failed to notice the administration's
mendacity a long time ago either weren't doing their homework, or
deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.

But as I said, better late than never. Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr.
Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and
morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that
Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost
the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the
back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some
conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of
the Bush administration.

It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious
question: What took you so long?