From a reader:
[I]t seems that the past eight years have brought us much further down Hayek’s road to serfdom than will ever be possible in a McCain administration. The explosion in government growth of recent years occurred under a Republican president whom we were assured was an honest-to-God conservative….It was the advocacy of folks like Levin and Rush Limbaugh that provided the cover for this explosion of government to take place without much protest.
I say all of this as someone who believes that, on balance, President Bush has been a strong president – particularly given all that he’s had to deal with. But, there are those of us honest-to-God conservatives out here who wish Levin and Limbaugh and the vast majority of the conservative punditry had gotten a little more exercised about the expansion in government over the past several years….
Rush and Mark Levin, and, from time to time, yours truly, did indeed get exercised–on more than one occasion, Rush went so far as to compare the fiscal policies of George W. Bush to those of Richard M. Nixon. But if the reader wishes to argue that we should all have done a great deal more–that we should have screamed and caterwauled and hollered to high heaven–I will not, at this late and sorry date, gainsay him.