Autumn of Discontent

Like Sullywatch, we've had less to say recently about Andrew Sullivan's commentary because his disembarking from the Dubya bandwagon seems genuine, notwithstanding the evidence that the old Bell Curve*/Fifth Column Sully is capable of popping up now and again. And he's certainly a better read than his (former?) pals Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds, both of whom generate their daily text quotas by sniping at the political opposition rather than any substantive analysis of the failings of the people who've been in charge for five years now.

Anyway, in the extensive list of comparisons of Dubya with British leaders, we'd like to see Sully expand on the comparison implicit in today's post explaining his disillusionment:

I became a conservative because I saw in my native country [the UK] what a terrible, incompetent, soul-destroying thing big government socialism is. It breaks my heart to see much of it now being implemented in America - by Republicans.

Thus he inches towards a comparison of Dubya with some ungodly hybrid of Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, and Harold Wilson [we have relevant posts about these three horsemen of the 1970s apocalypse here and here]. One risk that this creates is that from this political wildnerness, he'll be looking to latch on to an unexpected prophet who can lead conservatism and the country to salvation. Better still if the new quest could have echoes of the glory days of the early 1980s -- with a tough woman leading the charge. And he's got an old Sunday Times piece he can fall back on to refute charges of being inconstant -- when he endorses Hillary '08.

*UPDATE: Indeed, could Dubya's embrace of a very non-Bell Curve theory of poverty be part of the estrangement? -- "So the president spells out his post-Katrina policy: borrowing $200 billion to "clear away the legacy of inequality" ... So we have the federal government engaging in a massive program of social engineering to reverse racial inequality in one state. But if we can do it in one state, why not all of them?"

And one more update, before we elevate this issue to a new theme: of all the flaws that one might identify in Dubya, it's clearly his newly stated philosophy that economic inequality is both attributable to, and amenable to, government policy that is stuck in Sully's craw:

And getting smaller helps government focus on what it really should do, not on all the illusory goals that some liberals believe in, like, er, ending human inequality.