At the risk of being disinvited from this year’s White House Easter egg hunt, I’d like to add another point to the dissatisfaction many conservatives feel with the Bush administration.

At the time of the Roberts and Alito nominations, and especially when Harriet Miers was put forward, the following point was much made: That the modern American conservative movement, by arguing, publishing, educating, and persuading across many years, had nurtured a cadre of conservative judges ready to be called on when vacancies appeared on the Supreme Court. Much of the unhappiness about Miers arose from a belief that all this careful husbandry was going to waste.

I think there’s something of the same feeling with GWB. Reagan came out of an America whose commanding heights, cultural and political, were held by liberals. Yet he was a true conservative, of great principle and conviction. In the later America from which GWB emerged, conservative ideas were much more accessible & widespread, and there was a wider, deeper pool of real conservative from which the GOP might have chosen its presidential candidates. Yet here is a guy from that much-improved background, who is insouciant to, perhaps (I wouldn’t personally rule it out) ignorant of, two of the most fundamental principles of modern conservatism: fiscal restraint and government limitation. He is also distressingly naive on some key points of foreign policy, apparently believing, for example, that Vicente Fox is a friend of the USA, that Palestinian Arabs “yearn for freedom,” and so on.

That GWB put forward Harriet Miers as a plausible candidate for SCOTUS is bad enough. Worse is the suspicion, among many of us limited-govt, national-issue, and fiscal conservatives, that GWB is Harriet Miers, and that Bill Buckley and the other great nurturers of US conservatism over this past half century may have labored in vain.