David Frum has a very lengthy piece in the New York Magazine in which he asks “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?”. One part that really stuck out at me was this:

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program.

Of course that was then. Now we have conservatives, like Robert Stacy McCain, trying to paint Bush as some ultra-liberal:

You can read the whole thing, but I think the basic problem can be traced back to the Bush administration, when we were told that profoundly un-conservative things — “No Child Left Behind,” the USA-PATRIOT Act, Medicare Part D — were in fact fundamental to the conservative agenda. And when those things failed (either as policy or politics), the “brand damage” to the Republican Party was blamed on conservatives who had advocated those things.

Cronyism in federal appointments (“Heckuva job, Brownie“) is no part the conservative agenda, and yet when FEMA screwed up, conservatism got the blame. Micro-managing public school curricula from D.C. isn’t conservative, but when No Child Left Behind forced schools to “teach to the test,” enraged teachers didn’t blame liberals, did they? And you can’t find anything reading Burke, Kirk or Buckley that would support a policy of encouraging lenders to give poorly documented mortages to unqualified buyers, yet this is what the Bush administration did — and called it “conservative”!

I remember those days. If we questioned the Patriot Act we were told we wanted the terrorists to win. When the left said NCLB was a joke, the right quickly attacked. Medicare Part D was a brain child of Bush, Delay and Eric Cantor, all very far from the left.

America’s right spent years cheering what Bush did and now they want us to forget about it. The very fact that this is how they want us to remember history proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that these people care only about their party and not America. They dared not speak out against Bush back then because he was President and that whole Ronald Reagan 11th commandment bullshit.

You know want to hear something from a former President that should be burned into the minds of every American? How about this:

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

That was from the farewell address of the father of our nation, President George Washington. It’s amazing to see how these words, 215 years old, have become so true today. Both parties have been a destructive force on the America our forefathers envisioned, but the right has become the most destructive.

Trying to ignore the fact you supported a President, unconditionally, just because he was in the same party as you is the most un-American thing I can think of and we see the GOP engaging in it more and more. Someone should have told Ronald Reagan to take his 11th commandment and shove it right up his gipper hole! Instead Republicans took it to heart and followed far more closely than any of the actual ten commandments.