GOP hypocrites. Unbelievable gall. Now all of a sudden, the party that brought you the endless money pit that was and is the pointless Iraq and Afghan wars, at a cost of already over 2 trillion dollars during the past 8 years, now wants us to be financially conservative when it comes to helping out Americans?! Where was your self-righteous indignation when the GOP Congress year-after-year rubber stamped every foreign policy boondoggle during the last administration? Where was your ‘question everything’ attitude when banks were reporting billions of dollars in quarterly profits? How come you never stopped to ask the tough questions then? Because you were too busy reading your own financial statements to be worried about the greater-good that’s why.

No, I do not support your tea party. I do not support your questioning of the government. All I see is a vindictive motivation of a GOP completely out of fresh ideas and unable to look in the mirror and face the truth about their own past.

First you’re confusing the Republican Party with grassroots conservatives; they are not one in the same… George W. Bush may have been a lot of things but he was not a conservative, in fact one of the reasons his approval numbers were so low was that he had lost the support of grassroots conservatives.

Second a great many of us did question the Bush Administrations handling and even the necessity of the war in Iraq.

Third the mortgage mess didn’t start with the Bush Administration it is the result of policy and regulatory decisions made over the last 30 or so years starting with the Community Reinvestment Act. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, Wall Street and at least 3 presidents are all complicit in creating this mess.

Finally the tea party movement isn’t about Democrats or Republicans, or liberals or conservatives. It’s about commonsense, it about restoring responsibility and accountability to a government that, with rare exceptions, looks on we the people as either wards of the state or a revenue stream. The tea party movement is about the restoring the type of fiscal responsibility and limited government envisioned by the framers.

Forced to the ramparts to defend Rush Limbaugh against the spurious, low-down attacks of the Obamedia-plus-hangers-on, conservatives are letting the real enemy of  conservatism slip away. That enemy would be George W. Bush, whose stealth political legacy is a tectonic lurch Left for what is popularly thought of as “conservatism.” The resulting chaos–crisis, in fact–is exactly what the new collectivist-in-chief has seized on, not to change America’s direction, but to accelerate its Leftward shift. This continuity is what conservatives are failing to appreciate and assess, much to the detriment of their own coherence and political message.

West is entirely right, George W. Bush’s brand of neo-conservatism has done serious, and possibly lasting, damage to the Republican party and to the conservative movement. We can’t simply ignore his legacy or the effect it has had on the Republican Party or the conservative movement. We need to confront it and repudiate the out of control spending and leftward lurch that defined the Bush years.

H/T: Michelle Malkin.

Where Edwards loses me is here:

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

Not too long ago, conservatives were thought of as the locus of creative thought. Conservative think tanks (full disclosure: I was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation) were thought of as cutting-edge, offering conservative solutions to national problems. By the 2008 elections, the very idea of ideas had been rejected. One who listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches in the mid-’60s, or to Reagan’s in the ’80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism’s worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation’s public affairs.

The problems faced by the Republican party aren’t the fault of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter or the grass roots of the party. Conservatism is alive and well on main street, where its failed is in Washington… The party’s leadership and of its political consultants have abandoned the principles and ideas that made Ronald Reagan successful and replaced them with a brand of populist, politically expedient “republicanism” that has more in common with the Democratic party than it does with conservatism.

If  republicans are going to have any chance in 2012 or in the 2010 mid-terms the party leadership has rediscover core its core conservative principles and begin crafting policy ideas rooted in those principles.

H/T:  Hot Air.

Other McCain has a slightly different take.

Enough!

All this finger pointing ignores one simple truth: Republicans had ZERO chance of winning this election. They have spent much of the past decade destroying their “brand”, they abandoned solid conservative principles in favor of quasi conservative/centrist/populist ideas that lead to out of control spending and bad policy ideas like campaign finance reform and amnesty for illegal aliens that alienated their conservative base.

That plus the Bush Administration’s mismanagement of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with their ham-fisted response to hurricane Katrina and failure to engage their opponents in a meaningful policy debate not only deepened the divide with the party’s conservative base it helped alienate independent voters.

The basic problem for Republicans is that they’ve forgotten Conservatism is not policy idea it is a fundamental unwavering belief that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “… all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

If Republicans expect to have any chance of winning in the 2010 mid-term elections, much less the 2012 Presidential election, they have to rediscover those fundamental principles and return to being the party that embodies them through policies that promote fiscal responsibility and a smaller less intrusive government.

These truths should be self-evident; unfortunately they aren’t, they have to be articulated constantly, lest people forget what they are.