Two interesting voices of intra-conservative dissent have bubbled to the surface in the form of pieces by Bruce Bartlett, over at Capital Gains and Games, and Paul B. Farrell, over at MarketWatch. The former figure, a supply-side champion who was a domestic policy adviser to President Reagan and a Treasury official under the first President Bush, characterizes the modern Republican Party as a greedy, sociopathic group, saying it “is not the party of Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan that I was once a member of; it stands for nothing except the pursuit of power as an end in itself, with no concern whatsoever for what is right for the country.” The latter author, quoting David Stockman, President Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, damningly assays the hype and empty sloganeering of Republican fiscal ideology. Engrossing reads, both.
