Glenn Greenwald: The Bush administration is radical, but not ideological

There have been several interesting responses to the post I wrote regarding the emerging (and largely unprincipled) effort by conservatives to disassociate their political movement from the wildly unpopular George Bush by now proclaiming that Bush is not only a non-conservative, but is actually a liberal. The goal seems to be to ensure that liberalism, rather than conservatism, is to be blamed for Bush's collapsed presidency.

The branding of Bush as a "liberal" is something that appeared in this National Review article by Jonah Goldberg, and my subsequent exchange with Goldberg has spawned further posts on the subject -- including this reasonably substantive new reply from Goldberg himself, this thorough examination from Hunter at Daily Kos of how self-proclaimed "conservatives" actually govern (as opposed to how they theorize), and this not particularly coherent protest from Josh Trevino (at the new, "interestingly" named blog Swords Crossed), which almost entirely misses all of the points that have been made. I wanted to post a further reply because I think these issues are both interesting and important.