Philip is absolutely on target on all counts. Of course, Obama doesn’t NEED to maintain intellectual consistency, because he is THE ONE chosen by the lefty establishment media.
As for Bush, way back when a certain actress was still hedging about her own level of purity, in either 2004 or early early 2005 — I’ll have to look up the exact date — I wrote that “Bush is a conservative in the same way Britney Spears is a virgin: only when it suits his marketing.”
Credit Don Devine’s Conservative Battleline for printing that column of mine, and credit the San Francisco Chronicle, now endangered, for reprinting it shortly thereafter.
But don’t blame Bush alone. Blame Tom Delay, Dennis Hastert, and a host of others as well. The 2 a.m.-to-5 a.m. vote on the prescription drug abomination was mostly their work (although Bush did arrive back from abroad and start making calls sometime in that last hour of cheating), as were the pork fests beginning in 1998 and the corporate whoredom that made the tax code so much more of a monstrosity than it already was.
All of which is just to add to Phil’s excellent post.