Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan worries that Bush "is fusing Big Government liberalism with religious right moralism. It's the nanny state with more cash."The quotation is from a piece by Dough Bandow at Salon.com: "Why conservatives must not vote for Bush."
Actually, I've dealt with this before (here):
I wouldn't make too much of Bandow's supposed conservatism. In fact, he's one of the "holier-than-thou" brigade of deluded professional libertarians (a senior fellow at the Cato Institute) who prize ideological purity above all else. He's too high and mighty to give his endorsement to a mere mortal like Bush. He's waiting for the libertarian messiah to come in from the desert.I'll go further and say that Bandow is a "don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes" libertarian. Don't get me wrong, I love Cato's brand of economics (with some exceptions), but its view of foreign and defense policy is a mix of pre-World War II isolationism and appeasement.
Me, I'm no conservative either, just a Hobbesian libertarian who's inclined to vote for the lesser of two evils rather than waste a vote on a nutcase like Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party's candidate for president.
