Conservatives stood by Bush as he led them to financial ruin. If we had had a democrat President, they never would have let him get away with his out of control spending. Look how principled the Republicans were when Clinton was in office: they balanced the budget. With Bush, it was back to nightmare deficits. Face it, only the conservatives have ever cared about balanced budgets. When our supposedly conservative leaders throw that responsibility out the window (Cheney supposedly said that Reagan proved that balancing the budget didn’t matter—of all the things that he could have learned from Reagan, wouldn’t it be awful if that was the message he got?) there’s no one left to care as the nation sails towards bankruptcy.