I do think the refusal to pore over the Bush-Cheney fiasco honestly remains a major block to reform on the right. The rational ones must know that Bush’s Medicare D was far more expensive than the Affordable Care Act, and, unlike the ACA, was never budgeted. They must know that domestic spending exploded under Bush, even as he refused, unlike Reagan before him, to budge on his ruinous tax cuts. They know they cannot attack Obama’s allegedly imperial presidency without confronting the much more expansive claims for executive power made by Cheney et al. They also must know somewhere in their heads that the debt we now have was not created by Obama. He just had to manage it in the depths of the worst recession since the 1930s. The debt is a function of tax cuts we couldn’t afford, wars we couldn’t afford, a new entitlement we couldn’t afford and a recession caused by an unregulated Wall Street run amok.
And on current spending, they must know that Obama’s record – partly thanks to them – is of serious deficit reduction, year after year, from over 10 percent of GDP to just over 3 percent predicted in 2016. Because acknowledging this reality means self-criticism, they cannot do it (and I don’t mean criticism of other Republicans, but of your own responsibility for the mess). But until they engage in self-criticism, especially of the Bush-Cheney administration, they cannot get to a place where they don’t need rigid adherence to purist ideology to keep their own worldview afloat. And that’s the only place – a pragmatic, sane, constructive, reality-based place – where they can rebuild their party and their message. The longer the suppression of the truth about Bush the longer the dysfunction will last.