As I’ve mentioned before and probably will again, one conservative blogger I’ve been following for a long while is John Cole over at Balloon Juice. Truth is, my antipathy toward George Bush and religious zealotry notwithstanding, I’m not really all that liberal. So, back before it became obvious to just about everyone what a Bad Idea the Bush administration has become, I liked to read John Cole because, while he was a conservative, he seemed like a reasonable sort. Thing is, his reasoning has long since turned him against the Republican Party. The wheels started coming off when Bush made a special trip to sign the Schiavo legislation. And, since then, he’s been busily littering the Road to Damascus with scales from his eyes.
Today, he’s going so far as to express happiness that guys like Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and Pat Leahy are in power.
What has to happen is thoroughly repudiating [the Bush administration and their supporters] and their works. A notoriously fickle electorate has to keep them at bay. An obviously venal opposition has to rebuild the cage of laws around itself rather than running joyously rampant. I don’t like our chances, honestly.
. . .
It isn’t just a bad apple, as the whole barrel has gone bad. NASA, the FDA, Justice, FEMA, or, this week, the Department of the Interior and the GSA. Hell, do I even need to list them all? I am terrified to think what we will learn has been done with the IRS, and God only knows what is going on at Homeland Security. It is almost as if after years of accusing the Clinton administration of being the most crooked administration ever, they decided to experiment and see if they could be worse than their claims. Their success has been unparalleled in modern political history.So let’s all hear it for Waxman, Leahy, Schumer, Kennedy, and all the other partisan attack dogs on the side of the Democrats. I don’t for one minute share their political beliefs, and I still think Schumer would run over a handicapped kid to get in front of a microphone, but I sure as hell am glad they are in office. The hacks and the partisans and the phonies and the frauds are in charge, they are deeply entrenched, and it is going to take a bunker buster to root ‘em out.
I’m a big fan of John Cole, he’s one of the reasonable voices in the blogosphere and is always a good resource for a gut check on the Reality Based Community positions. He’s taken major flak from the RedState and LittleGreenFootballs crowds. His politics are a slight shade more conservative than my own “liberaltarian” tendencies but fairly classical liberal. He’s probably just as leery of the Libertarians as I am too.