Cheif Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Sam Alito. No he did not.
Perscription drug plan (expansion of government)
Education Bill (No Child Left Behind - Expansion of Government)
Non starter immigration policies
Dubai ports
Temporary tax cuts mixed with unrestrained spending isn't conservatism
Billions in global welfare, AIDS money ETC
"Doing A good job Brownie"
"I don't believe in using the military for so called Nation Building"- GW Bush, 2000
The list is long. Don't believe it? Consider Bartlett's review of Bush's major domestic legislative accomplishments.
He teamed up with Ted Kennedy to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, which increased education spending by over $20 billion and legislated a massive new federal intrusion into local schools. He co-opted Joe Lieberman's proposal to create a gigantic new federal bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security. He has mostly abandoned free trade in favor of a hodgepodge of interest-group-pleasing tariffs. And after initially opposing it, Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill with almost pathetic eagerness in the wake of the Enron debacle, putting in place a phonebook-sized stack of new business regulations.
Want more? He signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, a bête noir of conservatives for years. His Medicare prescription-drug bill was the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society. He initially put a hold on a wide range of last-minute executive orders from the Clinton administration, but after a few months of "study" allowed nearly all of them to stand. And he has increased domestic discretionary spending at a higher rate than any president since LBJ.
Bartlett even has a bone to pick with the most prominent feature of Bush's record that's incontestably conservative, his almost religious dedication to tax cuts. Yes, Bush has cut taxes. Yes, that's generally a good, conservative thing to do. But as Bartlett correctly points out, cutting taxes without cutting spending doesn't do the conservative cause any good. Bush and the modern Republican Party plainly have no interest in cutting federal spending, and the resulting massive deficits will eventually force "the largest tax increase in American history"--one that will be entirely Bush's fault. Some conservative.
The author of Impostor (Doubleday, $26.00) is Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan-era official and longtime conservative columnist. In fact, until last year--when he was fired for writing this book--he was a senior fellow at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-wing think tank dedicated to flat taxes, Social Security privatization, and a host of other conservative hot buttons.
Put in plain terms, Bartlett's charge is simple. George W. Bush, he says on page one, is a "pretend conservative." Philosophically, Bush actually has more in common with liberals than he does with true conservatives.
He had to have them in the first place in order to loose them. I know this now; I won’t be fooled again.