Bleatings from CPAC

The Globe's Susan Milligan reports on Republican self-loathing at CPAC. Or, rather, loathing for the guy they think got them to this predicament.

"Sadly, our former president propelled America to socialism - all the way to third base," with Obama set to bring it to home, said conservative columnist Deroy Murdock. "Our side emerged with neither principle nor power."

And John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, was equally non-nostalgic in speaking about his former boss: "We are better off, in some sense, not having the Bush administration to defend," the former Bush administration official said. "Too many people connected the Bush administration to conservatism, and as we all know, that didn't happen."

Even former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich - while winning laughs for deriding Democrats in power - slammed the recently-retired president.

"We didn't get real change. We got big spending under Bush, now we have big spending under Obama," said Gingrich, author of the "Contract With America" that underlay the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. "The great irony . . . is that we have a Bush-Obama big spending program that is bipartisan in nature," Gingrich told conference attendees.

Strangely, other than John McCain, for whom the opprobrium is fierce, no other Senate or House Republicans are called to account for the years leading up to the first cracks in their control of the Federal government. It is George Bush who is responsible for fiscal irresponsibility, not the politicians who aided and abetted the looting of government purses, the razing of regulatory bodies, and the outsourcing to crony contractors.

And, more strangely still, they seem blissfully unaware that all of that "connections to conservatism" that Bolton weirdly describes, has helped create the financial conditions to which the federal government is now trying to respond. They seem equally unaware a majority of Americans seem to appreciate that response.