So Bush was a liberal all along...?

Conservatives try to distance themselves from "Bush the liberal"

by Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

Yesterday, I referenced an article in National Review by Jonah Goldberg in which Goldberg argued that the two most glaring examples of failed Republican presidents -- Richard Nixon and George Bush -- weren't conservatives at all, but were actually liberals. I characterized this claim as "dishonest" because, as I pointed out, virtually no conservatives were claiming that Bush was a "liberal" when his popularity ratings were in the 60s and he was perceived as some sort of heroic, beloved political figure. It is only now that his approval ratings are reaching historically low levels, and it is becoming unavoidably apparent that his presidency is dying and failed, that conservatives are seeking to claim that Bush's failure is not a failure of conservatism because -- as it turns out -- Bush was really a liberal all along. Alas, Bush's failure is simply the latest instance of the failure of liberalism.
...
That newfound premise enables conservatives to argue that the collapse of the Bush presidency is not a case where a conservative failed. This is a case where a President failed because he wasn't a conservative at all, but was actually a liberal. Now that Bush's presidency is rapidly becoming an irreversible failure, the effort is underway to attribute those failures to Bush's liberalism -- something we never heard when Bush was popular and his presidency thriving.

In a very prescient post, Digby, quoting a speech from Rick Perlstein, predicted back in January that exactly this would happen. In fact, Digby and Perlstein's description of what conservatives would say once Bush's presidency irrevocably collapsed was almost verbatim what Goldberg said in his article:

My point was not that Grover and company were going to leave the Republican Party, but that they were laying the groundwork for purging others from the coalition. They will not do this while Bush is in office, for obvious reasons, but they are beginning to make the case that Bush was not a "real conservative" and therefore anything he did while in office cannot be defined as "conservatism." They do this whenever a politician becomes unpopular.

(The entire piece is here.)