Yeah that was just weird with Bush, I mean they LOVED that guy till that last year or two, then all of a sudden things fell away andf then it was as if no conservative ever liked Bush, they absolutely deserted the guy support wise, **** talked him for the stimulus and everything else. Six yeaars of Bush Cheney love fest, two years of cool down, then it was as if nobody had ever supported the guy, it was sort of surreal. I expect you're right, all these guys will pretend they never supported the guy or at best tolerated them. Conservatives are better at sticking together through minor differences, and they're also better at eatin their own when they've outlived their usefulness.
I took a long break from this site starting around 2011-ish, coming back in late 2017. I learned something when returning:
Bush made the bold argument about WMD in Iraq and the poorly-made argument about the need for democracy in the region. Most Conservatives blindly supported both. In 2005, I began arguing (and still do) that common sense and late-1990s targeting missions in Iraq show that it could not have ever really been about WMD. It was very much about, not only ridding ourselves of the UN mission in Iraq (in which Bin Laden exploited) but, a good place to re-direct the region towards democracy, which is a political ideology that has historically proven to deny religious fanaticism room to breathe. Bush failed to really make this argument and favored the WMD scare instead...but he did speak of a regional need to change. Conservatives absolutely loved my posts (though I gave absolutely no love to Rumsfeld). But I did not realize then that the only thing they loved was that I railed against liberals who refused to see the wider issues in the region. Their support for Bush, no matter what, was entirely partisan. They really didn't care where the military deployed or who was doing the killing and dying, only that Bush was a Republican. Evidence:
- They embraced McCain's foolish "can't set a date" and paraded around his Veteran status against the black community-worker who was born in Africa and loves Islam.
- They immediately turned on the NeoCon concept as soon as Obama was elected and pushed all blame on Obama for "pulling us out too soon." Liberals made the shallow I-told-you-so argument as groups like IS rose out of the long-existing issue, and Conservatives lacked the ability to defend because they clearly lacked the understanding of what they had actually supported.
- They then fell silent on Trickle-Down economics as they watched Bush and Obama bail out banks (which froze lending anyway and then began seizing homes and small businesses for the planned scheme) and corporations (which fired everybody anyway and began rewarding CEOs). Today, they actually refrain from the term while still applauding the failed concept.
- They chose to dismiss Global Warming as a hoax, simply because Gore was a Democrat and a Democrat President was at the helm when the world decided to start caring about it.
- As the Arab Spring began to consume almost twenty Arab countries in 2011, the world watched the regional masses protest for democracy and socioeconomic justice (the exact regional thing Bush argued for in 2002 over Iraq). American Conservatives chose to simply declare Obama a warmonger for assisting Libya from the sky, as opposed to dropping hundreds of thousands of American troops into Iraq.
- And of course, in 2016, a silver-spooned elitist who went well out of his way to avoid military service as McCain was a POW in Vietnam, conservatives gave him 14 million votes after he denigrated American POWs. Now, they simply altar the narrative and tell everybody that they always hated McCain and that he is like all the other "rinos" who prevent them from feeling good about themselves.
So, in the end, I learned that when people experience a multiple of their ideologies fail so rapidly, while consistently choosing to oppose the other side for no real reason at all, that they leave themselves with largely nothing to stand for. Now they look at a ***** grabbing adulterer, who solicits sexual favor from Playboy Bunnies and porn stars, who actually helped create the swamp that they declared needs draining, who has consistently stripped American influence in practically every region on earth, and they almost enthusiastically shrug as an irrational collective. I have no idea what they stand for anymore because they are too busy denying their own recent histories and seeking to re-write distant history in order to rebrand world events in a way that makes them the ever-enduring victim of "the left."