Bush isn’t a conservative.

WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush says he’s offering $17.4 billion in loans to the auto industry because letting them collapse is “not a responsible course of action.”

Actually, rewarding inept CEOs with taxpayer money is what’s “not a responsible course of action.” Chapter 11 bankruptcy would be the responsible cure for their ills, even strenghtening the industry, but as George Mason’s Prof. Todd Zywicki explained last week, “Those Washington politicians who repeat the mantra that ‘bankruptcy is not an option’ probably do so because they want to use free taxpayer money to bribe Detroit into manufacturing the green cars favored by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, rather than those cars American consumers want to buy. A Chapter 11 filing would remove these politicians’ leverage, thus explaining their desperation to avoid a bankruptcy.”

Chapter 11 has the added benefit of curbing compensation for management (those CEOs who ran Detroit into the ground) and forcing the United Auto Workers union to end the ridiculous clause where laid off workers receive up to 95% of their salary for several years. Chapter 11 allows the business to continue operations as long as it is restructuring — restructuring is exactly what the CEOs and UAW wants to avoid. They instead gladly suck on the teet of taxpayer money.

But folks, Bush’s failure to stand for free market principles is exactly how one goes from an expected partisan 45-50% approval rating to just 29% by the end of his term. It wasn’t Iraq, it wasn’t Guantanamo, etc., as the mainstream media and antiwar conglomerate would preach, rather it was Bush’s failure to champion those things near and dear to conservatives.

How can conservatives back a president whose end results appear no different than a President Obama’s?