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September 01, 2004
The Will to Criticize Bush
George F. Will is starting to get a little frustrated with the lack of differences between the Democrats and the Republicans these days. Among other things said in this column:
- President Bush's convention challenge is to tell voters, who already know America is at war, how the parties differ. Last week he made it dismayingly clear that, in the parties' contempt for the First Amendment, they don't.
- Bush, a supposed critic of the imperial judiciary, wants a court to order the Federal Election Commission to, in McClellan's words, "shut down" all such groups. And if a compliant court cannot be found, McClellan says Bush will try legislation. First try judicial fiat, then legislation as a last resort. Ah, conservatism.
- From the New Deal through the civil rights revolution, liberalism strove to use expanding government to drive the alteration of society. Conservatism's mission was largely restoration -- rolling back big government. Neither persuasion is now plausible.
- Kerry insists he is not a "redistribution Democrat." But of course he is. And Bush is a redistribution Republican.
- The vocabulary of the two-party argument just a generation ago now seems as anachronistic as the 1890s argument about the free coinage of silver. Liberals have next to nothing to say about poverty or, because of their servitude to the public education industry, about the calamitous inadequacy of inner-city schools, which is both a cause and a consequence of the social pathologies of poverty. Conservatives, whose party has delivered on its 2000 promise to increase federal involvement in education and health care, no longer invest even rhetorical energy in the cause of "small" or "limited" government. And now their presidential nominee wants an even bigger government role in policing speech.
Go get 'em, George!
Posted by Mike Tennant at September 1, 2004 12:45 PM