On the subject of democratizing Iraq and the Middle East, Bush has voiced some of the most extraordinarily ideological statements ever made by a sitting president. “Human cultures can be vastly different,” Bush told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in February  2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq. “Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on earth…For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.”

Happy thoughts, breathtakingly false. If this amounts to a worldview, it’s certainly not that of Burke. Indeed, Bush would probably be more at home among the revolutionary French, provided his taxes remained low, than among Burke’s Rockingham Whigs. (Burke would of course deny Bush admission to the Whigs in the first place, as Bush would be seen as an ideological comrade of the philosophes —if a singularly unreflective one.) ~Jeffrey Hart, The Washington Monthly

Mr. Hart continues to make excellent and withering criticisms of Mr. Bush and the modern GOP.  I would be more enthusiastic about his criticism of the Congress and administration in the Schiavo controversy if it were not so closely wrapped up in Hart’s own evident animus against social conservatives and his giving aid and comfort to Sullivan’s preposterous idea of Christianism.  But as a dissection of the madness of ideology now gripping the White House, the GOP and the movement as a whole, few do a better job than Hart.