Conservatives Aren't Crazy, They Just Want Their Turn

Don’t listen to the liberals telling you the right is crazy and going to heck in a handbasket. The reality is far simpler: “After 15 or 20 years of steady moderation, many conservatives think it might be time to give their ideas a try,” writes Jonah Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times. George W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative, he argues, but a “compassionate” one, meaning a free-spending moderate.

Bush oversaw the biggest education spending increase in history. He created the prescription drug benefit, the biggest new entitlement since the Great Society. He increased regulation with Sarbanes-Oxley. And oh yeah, he initiated the first bailouts and the TARP. Some of those may have been defensible moves, but they weren’t conservative ones. Then Republicans rolled out John McCain, another “unorthodox and inconsistent conservative.” Well, conservatives are sick of moderates, Goldberg writes. Sorry, Dede Scozzafava, they want real conservatives. (More conservative stories.)