Because [Bush] is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become
the Left’s perfect foil—its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell
has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas
II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an
unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets. Lenin needed the
calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the
Bolsheviks.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is
supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of
conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country
that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions
to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the
deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut
taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush
sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory
imperialism and turn it into administration policy.