Billion Dollar Bash (The Hidden Krugman)

Paul Krugman returns to the subject of conservative turncoats, noting that they're going easy on their criticisms (as one might expect). Here's a longish excerpt from Bogus Bush Bashing (fully available to Times Select subscribers):

Mr. Bush's new conservative critics don't say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That's not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can't criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision.

Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush's almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)

Meanwhile, the continuing allegiance of conservatives to tax cuts as the universal policy elixir prevents them from saying anything about the real sources of the federal budget deficit, in particular Mr. Bush's unprecedented decision to cut taxes in the middle of a war. (My colleague Bob Herbert points out that the Iraq hawks chose to fight a war with other people's children. They chose to fight it with other people's money, too.)

They can't even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years.

[...]

So what's left? Well, it's safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There's only one problem with this criticism: it's not true.

It's true that federal spending as a percentage of G.D.P. rose between 2001 and 2005. But the great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq war, and by rising health care costs.

Conservatives aren't criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since the Medicare drug program didn't start until 2006, the Bush administration can't be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. Whatever other fiscal excesses took place weren't large enough to play more than a marginal role in spending growth.

So where does the notion of Bush the big spender come from? In a direct sense it comes largely from Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who issued a report last fall alleging that government spending was out of control.

[...]

But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can't admit that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes — starting an unnecessary war, and using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts — they were cheering him on.

Markos (aka, Kos) over at Daily Kos had some thoughts in a similar vein on Saturday, responding to the Pew poll last week that placed the word "incompetent" as the word most offered to describe the President:

Bush is incompetent, sure. But by hammering on just that issue it suggests that Bush's policies would be better for our country if only we had someone more competent executing them. That's not true. Bush is both wrong on the issues AND incompetent.

[...]

More on Bush's incompetence -- conservatives, horrified that their entire worldview is collapsing around them, are deciding that it isn't their policies that are wrong -- it's that Bush blew it. So let conservatives hammer on Bush's incompetence while we hammer on the issues. If we give conservative a pass on their policies, it makes it easier for their candidates to argue for more competent leadership come election time.

Bring on the policies. Please! And speaking of Kos, he's also featured this week in the Questions section of the NYTimes magazine.