This is not, as someone always pipes up at this point, a vote on Bush. No, it isn’t, but it might as well be. George W. Bush has vetoed just one bill from the Congress his party controls, a bill on federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research — a boutique issue of no importance to the life of the nation. For the rest, Republican president and Republican Congress have been two hearts beating as one. They have worked together to lead the nation in the direction they think it should go.

And that direction has been away from conservatism, whose very heart and essence is the understanding that individual liberty waxes when government wanes, and vice versa. This president, and the Congress that has supported and enabled him, does not have that understanding. For all George W. Bush’s vapid blather about a yearning for liberty having been planted in the hearts of men by our Creator, there is no hint of a trace of a sign that Bush has ever given five seconds’ thought to the connection between individual liberty and government power. ~John Derbyshire

Absolutely right.  I especially like the line about “vapid blather,” since that vapid blather about the God of Freedom is something I do my best to ridicule in my article in the 11/20 American Conservative.  It has to say something for just how empty and unconvincing Mr. Bush’s “God of Freedom” rhetoric really is when you can have Christians and skeptics alike finding nothing worthwhile in it.