In the middle of an attack piece on Paul O’Neill, Michael Kinsley calmly makes this comment and moves on:

”It’s true that George W. Bush has turned out to be a more radical president than everyone predicted. But O’Neill has no insights about why it turned out this way, or why we should have seen it coming.”

Wow. ”Radical”? ”We should have seen it coming.” Understand, Kinsey is not a liberal commentator.

On the same page of the Albuquerque Journal, troglo-conservative John ‘Meow’ Leo writes, ”Democrats keep saying that President Bush is governing from the right. What they mean by this is uncertain, since the Bush domestic program pretty much tramples most conservative and Republican principles….”

Speaking of Cheney saying ”Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” Leo the Lion writes, ”Under what theory of government does a narrow midterm victory create a right to dramatically expand the deficit?” Amen.

”Social conservatives work hard to elect a Republican president, who then tends to behave pretty much like a conventional Democrat on social issues.” Leo then castigates the President for failing to destroy Title IX (maybe next term, when the gloves come off).

These are weird times, when the most radically conservative president in memory controls all three branches of government, gives money to the rich, to corporations, and to conservative Christians (ahem, ‘faith-based groups’) — gives everything to the people who keep him in power, and yet, those more radical than Bush (be very afraid) are disappointed in him.mjh