So says Christopher Buckley. An excerpt:
I say this because I have just read his new book, The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise. It’s not a perfect book by any means. It’s a bit preachy here and there, a bit speechy here and there, a bit cutesy here and there, and occasionally repetitive. That said, it is a thoroughly honest book about the largely, if not entirely, self-inflicted wounds the Republicans have visited upon themselves over the last eight or more years. And his argument that we are heading to certain fiscal disaster is quite calmly and dispassionately made. Into the bargain, Joe Scarborough comes across as a profoundly likeable and reasonable man. Reagan Lite, you might even say. Could we do better? I’m open to suggestions.
[…]
At home, Bush accumulated more debt that the country had amassed from the presidency of George Washington’s to Ronald Reagan’s.
“Big-government conservatism? Woodrow Wilson Republicans? Really. Is it any wonder that the Republican Party got slaughtered at the ballot box over the last two elections?”
He is unsparing about the disaster wrought by George W. Bush and the Republican majority. At times, indeed, it reads like an indictment co-authored by Michael Moore and Paul Krugman. Iraq, reckless spending, the works. His insight is that Bush and the Republicans were not in any sense “conservative,” but rather radical and ideological. In foreign policy, they tossed aside the Powell and Weinberger doctrines of restraint and went pell-mell into every quagmire in sight.