[Marxism] Some Right-wingers leaving Bush camp

[Christopher Carrico <ccarrico@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Conservatives restive about Bush policies
Fresh initiatives sought on Iraq, domestic front
By Dana Milbank and Jonathan Weisman

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4939538/

After three years of sweeping actions in both foreign and
domestic affairs, the Bush administration is facing
complaints from the conservative intelligentsia that it has
lost its ability to produce fresh policies.

The centerpiece of President Bush's foreign policy -- the
effort to transform Iraq into a peaceful democracy -- has
been undermined by a deadly insurrection and broadcast
photos of brutality by U.S. prison guards. On the domestic
side, conservatives and former administration officials say
the White House policy apparatus is moribund, with policies
driven by political expediency or ideological pressure
rather than by facts and expertise.

Conservatives have become unusually restive. Last Tuesday,
columnist George F. Will sharply criticized the
administration's Iraq policy, writing: "This administration
cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to
think and, having thought, to have second thoughts." Two
days earlier, Robert Kagan, a neoconservative supporter of
the Iraq war, wrote: "All but the most blindly devoted Bush
supporters can see that Bush administration officials have
no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month
from now."

The complaints about Bush's Iraq policy are relatively new,
but they are in some ways similar to long-standing criticism
about Bush's domestic policies. In a book released earlier
this year, former Bush Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill
described Bush as "a blind man in a room full of deaf
people" and said policymakers put politics before sound
policy judgments.

Echoing a criticism leveled by former Bush aide John J.
DiIulio Jr., who famously described "Mayberry Machiavellis"
running the White House, O'Neill said "the biggest
difference" between his time in government in the 1970s and
in the Bush administration "is that our group was mostly
about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney],
[Bush communications strategist] Karen [Hughes] and the gang
seemed to be mostly about politics."


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