Lakoff et al: Your Reading Assignment for the Day

[peristaltor]

Thanks to alostrael, here is your daily recommended reading:

Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush's "failures" and label him and his administration as incompetent. . . . Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off the same cliff.

(Emphasis mine.)

I emphasize the importance of this as a recovering conservative, one who voted Reagan only to learn from the experience.

Discuss. Further points to those that can expound on the underlying assumption behind the three tenets of The Conservative Agenda noted in the article.