How Bush Had Nothing To Do With It

In a slightly confused piece on the rapport between Barack Obama and the British Tory leader, David Cameron, we get this nugget from Chris Stirewalt:

George W. Bush famously offered a more compassionate brand of conservatism, but it mostly amounted to allowing Democrats to go ape on domestic spending in order to preserve funding for the Iraq war. The growth of the government under Bush is regarded as a failure, not an intentional departure.

For some reason, I thought the Republicans controlled the Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court for the overwhelming majority of the time Bush was president, and his own budgets were altered not so much in that time. For some reason, I recall that $32 trillion of future unfunded liabilities was added in the Medicare prescription drug act by forcing Republicans to stay up half the night until they signed on the dotted line. But I guess you have to massage history if you are to maintain the fiction that small government conservatism - barely practised even by Reagan - only died at the hands of the left.

Nah: Rove killed it. And it was premeditated murder.