Brain Fertilizer

Consider this:

When I hear conservatives — especially young ones — complaining about President Bush, I can't help thinking how they would have hated Reagan. Oh, sure, we all love him now. And I stress "now." He is remembered glowingly, as the Great Conservative who stood against Big Government and won the Cold War. It wasn't like that at the time, I promise you.

They did nothing but grouse about him for eight years, these conservatives (and sometimes they were right). He spent like crazy, running up huge deficits — historic deficits. He made bigger deficits than had "all the previous presidents in American history combined, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter," as Senator Moynihan used to say. This was conservatism?

He dealt with Tip O'Neill, raising taxes. (W. hasn't done that, and wouldn't.) Conservatives moaned and moaned. There used to be a joke: "This wouldn't be happening if Ronald Reagan were alive." And they cried, "Let Reagan be Reagan," expressing their belief that some evil moderates around him had brainwashed him, or steered him from the True Path.

And when he started playing with Gorbachev, our conservatives got serious jitters — wondering whether the old man was outright gaga. Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus, denounced Reagan as "a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda." Gregory Fossedal, a conservative foreign-policy thinker, went into the Oval Office bearing a Darth Vader doll — as a reminder to the president that he was dealing with an evil empire.

But with Reagan out of office, and dead, everyone's all weepy about him. And they will be this way with George W. Bush too, I predict. (I don't know how I got on this prediction jag.) More loudly than they curse him now, they will regret his departure from office, and hail his term, or terms, as a golden age of conservative principle and resolution.

Just you watch.

UPDATE:
In a case of meta-linking, I give you the Llama Butchers account of the Elder Bush's rehabilitation.