I’ve known Bruce for decades and he’s a fun guy to hang out with, but he’s gone hard to the left in recent years, pimping for a VAT and urging GOPers to sell out on health care.

But now he is officially crazy, because he wants us to believe that Obama is a conservative, or at least a moderate conservative.

Bruce cites five reasons in his article for this bizarre hypothesis.

1. “His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary”

This is a rather strange assertion. Obama flushed $800 billion down the federal toilet on a fake stimulus, but we’re supposed to believe he’s a “moderate conservative” because he didn’t waste even more of our money.

2. “He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary”

Okay, maybe this is true. I’m not competent to make any sweeping judgments on foreign policy.

3. “He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals”

This is an indictment of Romney and other squishy Republicans, not a sign of Obama’s moderate conservatism. Obama has radically expanded the role of government in a sector that already has been screwed up by government intervention. If this is conservative, I’m a communist.

4. “He caved to conservative demands that the Bush tax cuts be extended without getting any quid pro quo whatsoever”

Bruce is simply wrong. Obama wanted all of the “middle class” tax cuts extended, and he had to strike a deal with GOPers about “tax cuts for the rich.” To be fair, Obama’s position was at least somewhat moderate at the time, but he’s since come out of the pro-tax closet as part of the budget negotiations.

5. “And in the past few weeks he has supported deficit reductions that go far beyond those offered by Republicans.”

Bruce must be smoking crack. If Obama really wanted maximum deficit reduction, he could have supported the Ryan budget or the Republican Study Committee plan, both of which contained more deficit reduction than anything Obama has ever supported. But Bruce is making it seem as if the conservative position is maximum deficit reduction when the real goal is restraining the size of government. By Bruce’s absurd logic, doubling all taxes would be the conservative choice since “deficit reduction” theoretically is maximized.

I actually feel guilty about this blog post. I suspect Bruce doesn’t really believe what he writes and is just seeking attention. But I couldn’t resist.

Writing for Forbes, Bruce Bartlett puts forth an interesting hypothesis that healthcare legislation could have been made better (hopefully he meant to write “less destructive”) if the GOP had been willing to compromise with Democrats:

Democrats desperately wanted a bipartisan bill and would have given a lot to get a few Republicans on board. This undoubtedly would have led to enactment of a better health bill than the one we are likely to get. But Republicans never put forward an alternative health proposal. Instead, they took the position that our current health system is perfect just as it is.

Bruce makes several compelling points in the article, especially when he notes that it will be virtually impossible to repeal a bad bill after 2010 or 2012, but there are good reasons to disagree with his analysis. First, he is wrong in stating that Republicans were united against any compromise. Several GOP senators spent months trying to negotiate something less objectionable, but those discussions were futile. Also, I’m not sure it’s correct to assert Republicans took a the-current-system-is-perfect position.

They may not have offered a full alternative (they did have a few good reforms such as allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines), but their main message was that the Democrats were going to make the current system worse. Strikes me as a perfectly reasonable position, one that I imagine Bruce shares. But let’s further explore Bruce’s core hypothesis: Would compromise have generated a better bill? It’s possible, to be sure, but there are also several reasons why that approach may have backfired:

1. It’s not clear a policy of compromise would have produced a less-objectionable bill. Would Senate Democrats have made more concessions to Grassley and Snowe rather than Lieberman and Nelson (much less whether the “concessions” would have been good policy)? And even if Reid made some significant (and positive) concessions, is there any reason to think those reforms would have survived a conference committee with the House? Yet the compromising Republicans probably would have felt invested in the process and obliged to support the final bill – even if the conference committee produced something worse than the original Senate Democrat proposal.

2. A take-no-prisoners strategy may be high risk, but it can produce high rewards. In the early 1990s, the Republicans took a no-compromise position when fighting Bill Clinton’s health plan (aka, Hillarycare), and that strategy was ultimately successful. We still don’t know the final result of this battle (much less how events would have transpired with a different strategy), but if the long-term goal is to minimize government expansion, a no-compromise approach is perfectly reasonable.

3. A principled opposition to government-run healthcare will help win other fights. The Democrats ultimately may win the healthcare battle, but the leadership will have been forced to spend lots of time and energy, and also use up lots of political chits. Does anyone now think they can pass a “climate change” bill? The answer, almost certainly, is no.

4. A principled approach can be good politics, which can eventually lead to good policy. Democrats wanted a few Republicans on board in part to help give them political cover. The aura of bipartisanship would have given Democrats a good talking point for the 2010 elections (“my opponent is being unreasonable since even X Republicans also supported the legislation”). That fig leaf does not exist now, which makes it more likely that Democrats will pay a heavy price during the mid-term elections. It is impossible to know whether 2010 will be a 1994-style rout, or whether the newly-elected Republicans will quickly morph into Bush-style big-government conservatives (who often do more damage to liberty than Democrats), but at least there is a reasonable likelihood of more pro-liberty lawmakers.

When all is said and done, Bruce’s strategy is not necessarily wrong, but it does guarantee defeat. Government gets bigger and freedom diminishes. For reasons of principle and practicality, Republicans should do the right thing.

“Once upon a time, not too many years ago, the Republican Party was the party of ideas. Would even its staunchest supporters say so today? I think not. The sole substance of the Republican Party today is opposition to whatever the Democrats are for, period.”

Were it true, it would be damning.  Thankfully it’s not.

My friend, a former White House high-ranking employee in both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, grew angry, very angry, about the direction of the Republican Party under President Bush 43, something upon which I agree with him.  But, unlike him, I prefer to stay and fight for what’s right within the party I agree with most, not abandon it. He grew so angry that he voted for Obama in 2008.  Now, I don’t claim to know how any human being works internally, but I don’t understand how someone who claims to be a conservative could make that sort of switch. Simply because your side didn’t live up to their ideals doesn’t mean, to my mind, that  you switch to the side that advocates explicitly the opposite point of view.

But that’s neither here nor there. My friend, and everyone else, is free to vote for whomever they want, for whatever reason they want.  What I take issue with his the common mantra of the Left, echoed by my friend, that Republicans are out of ideas and Democrats are a fountain new ones.

What Democrats are proposing, be it on health care, cap and trade, or any other items on their long “to-do” list, is not new. They’re very old, tired and have been proven wrong.  Do we really need to create “new” arguments against these heavy-handed government intrusions?

Canada, thanks to lawsuits, is moving towards increasing the role of the private sector in health care. (Nothing like an actual ‘public option’ to focus the mind.)  The so-called “green jobs” initiative in Spain has been found to cost 2.2 existing jobs for each job created, a complete failure. If the rest of the world is turning away from these fantasies, what are we doing?

Even as these ideas fail around the world, liberals in Congress and the Obama Administration plow full-speed ahead to force them on us.  There’s a joke about the definition of insanity just sitting there, but I’ll allow you to make it yourself.

On the other hand, there are the über-Leftists like those at the New York Times, and their choir on MSNBC that constantly regurgitates the line that Republicans are bereft of ideas.  You can’t read the intellectually devoid ramblings of Krugman, Dowd or Rich without wondering what planet they live on (then you realize it’s Manhattan and it begins to make a little sense). And you can’t turn on MSNBC without the latest Media Matters/George Soros talking point coming out of the mouths of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz (though looking at Ed you’d suspect his mouth is a one way street and it’s not out).

“Republicans have no solutions,” “They have no plan,” “They are out of ideas,” are standard fare for these “intellectual giants” while interviewing some committed statist with whom they are 100 percent simpatico.  But when your show prep involves what seems to be a T1 line from the Tides Foundation and Moveon.org directly into your teleprompter, intellectual honesty, or even curiosity, simply isn’t in your wheelhouse.

These merchants of dishonesty spread the lie that the George W. Bush years were somehow the glory days of the free market, deregulation and conservative governance.  They were not.

They blame much of the economic problems we face today on the Reagan years, in addition to Bush 43, as if government regulatory bodies didn’t exist in these years, or their power was somehow muffled amid a stead shrinking of government power.  They also forget the many years in which Democrats controlled Congress and the White House. Listening to the unstable folks at MSNBC, you’d think we had runaway, wild-west conservatism since 1980.

The fact of the matter is this: the solutions proposed today by Republicans–the true, free market reforms, have NEVER been tried. FDR’s wage controls forced employers to marry health insurance to employment, as a way to increase compensation when they weren’t allowed, by federal law, to increase wages. As a result, our health insurance market is targeted to employers, leaving the self-employed or individuals with the short straw.

People are not free to buy health insurance across state lines, but large companies are.  Small businesses cannot partner with each other to lower premiums for better health insurance. The federal government prohibits this. The mythical conservative Utopia programmed into the minds of these Chatty Cathy dolls on MSNBC and the Times not only doesn’t exist, it has never existed in the modern age.

So why should conservatives abandon the free market concepts that have proven to work elsewhere in the economy simply because they aren’t “new”? The answer is they shouldn’t.  Correct ideas should not be abandoned simply because they’ve been around a while.  Yes, they do need to articulate them more often, and more clearly, but to say they have no ideas is simply dishonest.

Then again, you’d have better luck Snipe hunting than finding honesty on MSNBC or the opinion pages of the Times.