(A reporter asks Henry Paulson, 'what blame the Bush administration should take' over the financial meltdown on 09/15/08)

Ross Douthat of the NY Times makes the case that Bush's Iraq war failures brought on the resurgence of liberals in his newest op-ed:

History is too contingent to say that had there been no Iraq invasion in 2003, there would be no Democratic majority in 2012. (It’s easy enough to imagine counterfactuals that might have put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.) But the Democratic majority that we do have is a majority that the Iraq war created: its energy and strategies, its leadership and policy goals, and even its cultural advantages were forged in the backlash against George W. Bush’s Middle East policies.

All those now-apologetic liberals who supported the war in 2003 are a big part of this story, because without their hawkishness there would have been no antiwar rebellion on the left — no Michael Moore and Howard Dean, no Daily Kos and all its “netroots” imitators.This rebellion divided the Democrats, but it also energized them.

His piece goes on to name many other Bush failures which he says led us to the Obama Era. Not all of his points are invalid---I agree that the Iraq war galvanized the left for sure, but he either carelessly or deliberately left out a very important failure that happened under Bush's watch, can you see it?

The Bush White House’s “compassionate conservatism” was the last major Republican attempt to claim the political center — to balance traditional conservative goals on taxes and entitlement reform with more bipartisan appeals on education, health care, immigration and poverty. And as long as the Republican Party was successfully hovering near the middle, the Democrats had to hover there as well.

But once Bush’s foreign policy credibility collapsed, his domestic political capital collapsed as well: moderates stopped working with him, conservatives rebelled, and the White House’s planned second-term agenda — Social Security reform, tax and health care reform, immigration overhaul — never happened.

This collapse, and the Republican Party’s failure to recover from it, enabled the Democrats to not only seize the center but push it leftward, and advance far bolder proposals than either Al Gore or John Kerry had dared to offer. The Iraq war didn’t just make Obama possible — it made Obamacare possible as well.

He's omitting a key ingredient of Bush's epic failure scope----the global financial meltdown. Many conservatives do the same thing. To refresh Ross's memory, McCain took the lead in the 2008 general election after he named Sarah Palin to the ticket on Aug. 29, 2008. On August 30th, Obama had an eight point lead 50-42 in the Gallup poll and on September 1, the RNC started their convention. On September 2, the lead was cut to four points and then after Sarah Palin gave her speech on September 3rd, the next day the McCain ticket jumped out to a three point lead. A five point turnaround overnight. This lead continued until news started to leak out that the US economy was in dire straits. For McCain to take the lead in September for ten straight days that late in an election cycle was not an easy feat to accomplish especially since as Douthat asserts---George Bush had screwed the pooch really bad. If not for the financial collapse would McCain and Palin have been able to steal the 2008 election away from Obama and Biden? I know I was very nervous during those ten days. I met up with Paul Krugman after the election was over for a lunch in Santa Monica and he voiced some of the same thoughts I had about that period of time also.

Why did Ross fail to include the $700 billion ask by Henry Paulson as a major failure of the Bush administration? Might it be that the only thing the GOP has left to hang its hat on is the economy and conservatives will do anything they can to omit that from the lexicon of George Bush?

When I saw Ross' New York Times op-ed headline, More Babies Please, I thought the former Fox News host John Gibson was subbing for him because the idea was exactly Gibson's point only in a much more racist context.

John Gibson urged viewers to "[d]o your duty. Make more babies," because he had found out, from a recently released report, that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson added: "You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic." Gibson later repeated: "To put it bluntly, we need more babies.".

I was at dinner with Digby and Howie last night and I told them that every time somebody complains that so-and-so should be kicked off CNN or MSNBC because they are a rabidly insane conservative, I usually ask who would you replace them with? There's a pause and then the realization that you'd have to send in just another crackpot. I can count on one hand how many moderate conservatives are left who are interested in telling some truths.

See, I don't believe that many conservative pundits are married to the climate denying, knuckle-dragging, pro-rape, anti-evolution positions that they support on TV. It's just that they either get elected or make tremendous amounts of money saying these things. After a while it's hard for them to discern truth from lies. Case in point---the NY Times' Ross Douthat. Check this out:

America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).

Douthat knows exactly how insanely anti-immigrant the GOP is, so I thought he was joking at first, but then I kept reading and realized he wasn't trying to make a funny. He just lives in a conservative world that's so full of lies he might even believe those words about 63% of the time.

Here's Ross Douthat in Sunday's New York Times, engaging in some typical "both sides do it" nonsense about the Catholic vote.

The collapse in the church’s reputation has coincided with a substantial loss of Catholic influence in American political debates. Whereas eight years ago, a Catholic view of economics and culture represented a center that both parties hoped to claim, today’s Republicans are more likely to channel Ayn Rand than Thomas Aquinas, and a strident social liberalism holds the whip hand in the Democratic Party.

Indeed, between Mitt Romney’s comments about the mooching 47 percent and the White House’s cynical decision to energize its base by picking fights over abortion and contraception, both parties spent 2012 effectively running against Catholic ideas about the common good.

First, how did Barack Obama manage to win the Catholic vote by "running against Catholic ideas about the common good"? (Oh, and by the way, he also won the Catholic vote in 2008 as well -- as did Al Gore in 2000.)

Kind of a glaring omission that Douthat doesn't mention, you know, how Catholics actually voted in the election, isn't it?

Also, Republicans in Washington and around the country spent a great deal of time and energy in the two years before the election obsessing about transvaginal ultrasounds and Planned Parenthood. Douthat doesn't find that the slightest bit cynical, apparently.

The problem for authoritarian conservatives like Douthat is that the GOP is wildly out of step with the US Catholic Bishops and the Vatican on just about every economic issue: wealth inequality, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unions, universal health care -- even global warming (not to mention the death penalty and immigration).

The other problem he has is that American Catholics overwhelmingly reject the bishops' stance on the sex stuff the GOP obsesses about and a whopping 60% of them want the Church's leadership to focus on social justice issues -- which are of course anathema to the Republican Party.

And that's why Republicans keep losing the Catholic vote. The GOP with their emphasis on cutting taxes for rich people and gutting the social safety net and demonizing immigrants and gays and obsessing about unapproved sexytime simply doesn't represent the majority of American Catholics' values. And they're voting accordingly.

That's a bitter pill for right-wingers like Douthat to accept, but that's the reason -- not because the "Catholic moment in America has passed" -- whatever the hell that means.