Conservatives do not like the Monkey, either

[MADem]

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WHAT CONSERVATIVES REALLY THINK OF BUSH.

...But, for many conservatives, the current bout of Bush hatred is nothing new. They have felt it themselves for many years. A month before the Republican convention, Andrew Ferguson wrote in The Weekly Standard, "e'll let slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing." But instead of voicing their anxieties about Bush, these conservatives suppressed their feelings for fear of suffering retribution from the White House and the conservative press. And this suppression, in turn, seems to have exacerbated their feeling of alienation.

The best guide to this critique can be found in the writings of the two most incisive conservative columnists: Ramesh Ponnuru and George Will. Writing about Bush's big-government conservatism in National Review two years ago, Ponnuru argued: "More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton." And it wasn't just the spending that irked. Well before Harriet Miers, Ponnuru delivered a long list of ideological betrayals: from the imposition of steel tariffs to new accounting regulations to the creation of a new Cabinet department.

Will's columns have hinted at a second, albeit less widely articulated, source of ideological unhappiness. By attempting to remake the Middle East, the administration has embraced a project so utopian and ambitious that it transgresses every principle of Burkean conservatism. Will especially warned against transforming the political culture of the region....The widespread conservative discomfort with the Bush domestic agenda and the Iraq war has yet to bubble over. But the Miers debate gives every reason to believe that it will. Watching conservative bloggers and columnists join the Miers controversy has provided an important object lesson in social anthropology. After years of eviscerating every critic of Bush, sites like The Corner have followed their herd mentality in the exact opposite direction. (Only now that The Corner has plunged into this internecine warfare, which happens to jibe with the political interests of liberals, its atmosphere gets roundly described as intellectually honest.)

That's what should make the spectacle of the past week so troubling to the Bush administration. It has depended on orthodoxy within the movement to suppress complaints. But now that discipline has broken down. The conservative movement increasingly resembles a dictator's palace in the midst of a coup. Comrades have begun turning on one another with incredible fervor, as the widely ridiculed Bush apologist Hugh Hewitt will now surely attest. These days, you never know who will get dragged out and shot next. Since so many nagging complaints have festered for so long, it will surely get even uglier.

Boo hoo hoo!!!!! Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas!