Another anti-Bush Reaganite

The NYT of February 13 had a brief feature about Bruce Bartlett, former domestic policy aide to Ronald Reagan and deputy assistant treasury secretary under President George H.W. Bush. His new book is Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy:

Although "Impostor" is flamboyant in its anti-Bush sentiments — on the first page Mr. Bartlett calls Mr. Bush a "pretend conservative" and compares him to Richard Nixon, "a man who used the right to pursue his agenda" — its basic message reflects the frustration of many conservatives who say that Mr. Bush has been on a five-year federal spending binge. Like them, Mr. Bartlett is particularly upset about Mr. Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan, which is expected to cost more than $700 billion over the next decade.

He is unhappy, too, with the president's education and campaign finance bills and his proposal to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, which many Republicans call a dressed-up amnesty plan. The book, to be published by Doubleday on Feb. 28, also criticizes the White House for "an anti-intellectual distrust of facts and analysis" and an obsession with secrecy.

This quote probably won't go over well in the average Republican household:

"The Clinton people were vastly more open and easier to deal with and, quite frankly, a lot better on the issues."

In fact, in October Bartlett was fired from his position as a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis.

About 10 days ago, I blogged about another former Reagan Treasury official, Paul Craig Roberts, who is even more vehemently anti-Bush. There are links in that article to still more entries about other Republicans who are outraged by Bush. I forgot to link to this one, however.


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