Scooter, Brownie, Duke and Kenny Boy

Forty, fifty years ago political conservatives in the USA believed in a balanced budget and prudent government spending. They insisted they were better with money than "tax-and-spend liberals."

Then, slowly, over the years it changed: After Democratic President Clinton paid off the debts run up by Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush the First, President Bush the Second has the govenment awash in red ink. Now, instead of taxing we borrow and spend like a drunken sailor.

Traditionally, conservatives use to tilt toward isolationism and away from adventures abroad. Now Bush’s America has a policy of preemptive war, to prevent war. (Is that anything like burning the village down to save it?) Now the America of the so-called “neoconservatives” feels free to torture people it captures and suspects might know something.

At one time conservatives -- the conservatives who saw Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley as their voices -- wanted government to stay out of the American peoples' personal lives. Now it’s OK for Big Bro Bush to listen to your phone calls, read your emails and anything else he chooses to do under the umbrella of fighting the War on Terror.

So what do these newfangled, “situational conservatives” believe in?

Nicknames: Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, “Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld, Michael “Brownie” Brown, Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay, Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove, Jack “Indian-Swindler” Abramoff, Dick “Halliburton” Cheney, George W. “Mission Accomplished” Bush ... can you dig it?

Howard Fineman, writing for Newsweek comments on today’s Enron convictions with his “Kenny Boy, Meet Brownie”:

“If you want a date to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush Era in American life, you may as well make it this one: May 25, 2006. The Enron jury in Houston didn’t just put the wood to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The jurors took a chain saw to the moral claims of the Texas-based corporate culture that had helped fuel the rise to power of President George W. Bush.”