Libertarian Right Deserts King George

After long being almost indestinguishable from the cheerleaders of Bushism, leading many on the Right to pretend to be "libertarian" rather than simply sycophantic in order to adopt a faux-intellectual integrity, the libertarian Right is finally showing signs of leaving the GOP's big tent - driven out by Dubya's monarchical excesses and the corruption rife in a party gone mad with power. Now they are beginning to follow the Left who have been asking for years now "What exactly has happened to the conservative movement, has it become a bunch of apparatchiks working for private gain?"

The Cato Institute on Bush's monarchical excesses:

far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;

a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;

a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as "enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror— in other words, perhaps forever; and

a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

Libertarian website "Reason" - one of the few that really has preserved it's integrity during the Right's love affair with Bush - interviews Weekly Standard journalist Matthew Continetti who has been writing about the K Street Gang and GOP corruption, in an article entitled "Where the Right Went Rotten":

Reason: When this scandal really started to heat up, the radio host Hugh Hewitt—who writes for your magazine's website—predicted that Tom DeLay would be found innocent but that Harry Reid would be implicated and disgraced. Why aren’t you writing about how this scandal is going to destroy the Democrats? Why go after these Republicans?

MC: Because that’s where the story is. It is true that Abramoff directed his clients to donate to Democratic politicians, including Harry Reid. But when you look at the overall sums he directed clients to donate, it was overwhelmingly to Republicans. This was a man who fervently believed in the conservative movement and the Republican party. If this was a story about a Democratic scandal, of course I’d be writing about the Democratic scandal. But this is a Republican scandal, so the characters you’re going to write about are conservative Republicans. In many cases, extremely prominent ones. I think too many people in our polarized politics just put on blinders. They only want news that confirms their beliefs. When you have headlines announcing that Harry Reid is involved, then this was a scandal. But when the headlines say Tom DeLay was involved—oh, this is much ado about nothing. I would caution pundits about always reaching for the conclusions that back up what they already think.

The most remarkable thing about this is that were the above quotes to come from liberal figures, the Right would by-and-large write them off as the ravings of Bush-haters. Coming from such places as the very much ultra-right-libertarian Cato Institute and a staff writer for the Weekly Standard, they cannot be written off. That is why you will find little mention of either of these links amongst the Bushevik blogs. They are trying to ignore what they cannot simply smear as "moonbattery".