BUSH'S BASE FEELS BETRAYED

Boy, Dubya sure is having his troubles. The wingnuts are angry about his immigration proposals, Speaker Hastert is mad that his buddy Porter Goss was sacked from his job as CIA Director, Senate and House Republicans are engaging in "open warfare," and his approval numbers just keep on shrinking.

Conservative direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie explains:

The main cause of conservatives' anger with Bush is this: He talked like a conservative to win our votes but never governed like a conservative.

For all of conservatives' patience, we've been rewarded with the botched Hurricane Katrina response, headed by an unqualified director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which proved that the government isn't ready for the next disaster. We've been rewarded with an amnesty plan for illegal immigrants. We've been rewarded with a war in Iraq that drags on because of the failure to provide adequate resources at the beginning, and with exactly the sort of "nation-building" that Candidate Bush said he opposed.
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Conservatives did not spend decades going door to door, staffing phone banks and compiling lists of like-minded voters so Republican congressmen could have highways named after them and so there could be an affirmative-action program for Republican lobbyists.

White House and congressional Republicans seem to have adopted a one-word strategy: bribery. Buy off seniors with a prescription drug benefit. Buy off the steel industry with tariffs. Buy off agribusiness with subsidies. The cost of illegal bribery (see the case of former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham) pales next to that of legal bribery such as congressional earmarks.

Where's the anti-abortion legislation? he asks. Where's the constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage? How dare a Rethuglican Congress allow taxpayer money be used for stem-cell research? Where are all the right-wing judges we were promised? It's all about enacting a Big Business legislative agenda, he asserts (duh!).

Maybe conservatives should stay home during the midterm elections, he muses, and stop giving money to the RNC.

I've never seen conservatives so downright fed up as they are today. The current relationship between Washington Republicans and the nation's conservatives makes me think of a cheating husband whose wife catches him, and forgives him, time and time again. Then one day he comes home to discover that she has packed her bags and called a cab -- and a divorce lawyer.

As the philanderer learns: Hell hath no fury. . . .

Couldn't happen to a more worthy bunch of people. But I have no sympathy for the conservatives. They helped elect a man as president of the United States who, Viguerie himself admits, had a name but little experience, and brought the deluge upon us all. And with the priorities he lists, at such a tumultuous time in our history, they certainly deserve exactly what they got. Problem is, the rest of us don't, but they've stuck us with him, too.

Tags: Richard Viguerie, conservative anger, Bush, Congressional Republicans