Free A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency by Glenn Greenwald Page A

indicted, and some convicted, as a result of a scandal that grew out of the administration’s violations of legal prohibitions on providing aid to the Nicaraguan contras. To be sure, Reagan paid rhetorical homage to conservative theories, but his actual governance deviated in multiple ways from those principles.
    Regardless of one’s view of that debate, it is beyond reasonable dispute that President Bush’s actions and policies deviate fundamentally, and in almost every area, from the theoretical precepts of political conservatism. Whatever one might call the set of guiding principles animating President Bush, political conservatism—at least as it exists in its storied, theoretical form—is not it.
    Since President Bush was inaugurated, discretionary domestic spending has skyrocketed, both in absolute terms and when compared to the budget-balancing Clinton administration. In 2003, the right-leaning Cato Institute published a detailed assessment of federal government spending over the preceding thirty years—entitled “‘Conservative’ Bush Spends More Than ‘Liberal’ Presidents Clinton, Carter.” It concluded:

But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have skyrocketed by almost 28 percent. Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping spending increases under Bush of 70 percent and 65 percent respectively….
After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush’s three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.

    Those profligate spending patterns only worsened as the Bush presidency proceeded. In 2005, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published a study by its own Veronique de Rugy and Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie. The report was entitled “Bush the Budget Basher” and concluded: “After five years of Republican reign, it’s time for small-government conservatives to acknowledge that the GOP has forfeited its credibility when it comes to spending restraint.”
    President Bush has not only violated every claimed tenet of conservatism when it comes to restraints on federal spending, but he ranks among the most fiscally reckless presidents in modern times—so insists the pro-Bush AEI:

“After 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared [the budget] down pretty good,” Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) crowed a few weeks back during ongoing budget deliberations. But nothing could be farther from the truth, at least since the GOP gained the White House in 2001.
During his five years at the helm of the nation’s budget, the president has expanded a wide array of “compassionate” welfare-state, defense, and nondefense programs. When it comes to spending, Bush is no Reagan. Alas, he is also no Clinton and not even Nixon. The recent president he most resembles is in fact fellow Texan and legendary spendthrift Lyndon Baines Johnson—except that Bush is in many ways even more profligate with the public till.

    These massive spending increases are entirely independent of any 9/11-related or defense-based expenditures: “When homeland security spending is separated out, the increase in discretionary spending is still huge: 36 percent on Bush’s watch,” according to the AEI. During the Bush presidency, total real discretionary outlays increased by 35.8 percent. By comparison, the same figure increased by only 11.2 percent during the