It's all the liberals fault that Bush is a failure!

Tristero at Hullabaloo pounces on Orlando Patterson's bizarre NYT column which attempts to show the incompetent Bush as a misnamed liberal rather than the never wrong conservative.

Tristero slices and dices the article:
"As Digby has pointed out on numerous occasions, conservatism can never be wrong, liberalism can never be right. Therefore, if people calling themselves "conservative" (neo, or whatever) are wrong, then they cannot be, in reality, conservatives but misnamed liberals. Once we see that they are not "real" conservatives, they can easily be condemned and conservatism's infallibility is preserved.

But wait, there's more! Orlando moves so fast he's slipped one heckuva strawman past the readers of the Times. And that is the liberal belief about freedom that is at the core of his confused argument, namely

... the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition.

Nowhere does he provide a quote from what he calls the "liberal past" from any liberal actually believed that. He depends upon our half-remembering Rousseau, Locke, the Enlightenment gang - surely, we assume, one of them said, somewhere or another that freedom is a natural part of the human condition. So Orlando can't be bothered to tell us exactly where.

And that is for a very good reason. Orlando's description of the liberal "doctrine" of freedom as a natural condition is a grotesque distortion. Perhaps somewhere Locke actually said exactly that, but Orlando's ripped it from context, and oversimplified the idea, making it appear self-evidently naive and foolish. It is easy to swat away."

[snip]

"No, Orlando, the problem of Bush/Iraq wasn't a naive liberalism. Nor was it a callow president misunderstanding the liberal founder, Locke. It was stupid, ignornant, malicious people in thrall with an ultra-conservative, fascist ideology that perpetrated Bush/Iraq. It was a terrible idea and only terrible people would act on it. Their worldview - marinated in a foul imperialistic manicheism - is uttlerly illiberal.

The incoherence and disortions noted above in Orlando's op-ed are inexcuasable. He, like so many others who are now making the case for the "liberal" failure o George W. Bush are just clowning around. For in truth, a genuinely useful American intellectual discourse begins with what Orlando tries to exorcise - the articulation of a 21st century liberalism. One more sleazy attempt to blame liberalism for the obscene, forseeable failures of the conservative movement is the last thing we need."