Piling up

Conservative anger with the criminally incompetent Presidential administration keeps growing.

Following is an excerpt from a review in Washington Monthly of "The Making of the American Conservative Mind" by Jeffrey Hart

To prove your conservative bona fides these days, you have to begin by denouncing conservatism. To the delight of many liberals, a flurry of conservative writers and think-tankers at places like the Cato Institute and the Nixon Center are doing just that, condemning George W. Bush for being, among other things, a "redistribution Republican" (George F. Will), a "socialist" (Andrew Sullivan), and an "impostor" (Bruce Bartlett). Now add Jeffrey Hart to the list of aggrieved accusers.

Hart, a professor of English at Dartmouth College and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, has unimpeachable conservative credentials. He has been a regular contributor to National Review since the 1960s. His son Ben Hart was an editor at The Dartmouth Review and a leader of what the Heritage Foundation billed as a "Third Generation" of new conservatives in the early 1980s. A Burkean conservative, Jeffrey Hart has weighed in primarily on cultural issues, lamenting what he sees as the corruption of American arts and letters. But like NR founder William F. Buckley Jr. ("insurrectionists in Iraq can't be defeated by any means that we would consent to use"), he is also a critic of the Iraq war. In a March 11, 2005, letter to The Dartmouth Review, for example, Hart took aim at Bush's selling of the war: "You do not have to get eyesore burrowing in the archives to find astonishing patterns of deception."

Read the rest here.