Julie Ponzi at No Left Turns notes fears that conservatives have that Bush will betray them on immigration and offers this gem:
People usually actually are what they say they are in their most honest moments. I don't think Bush has many dishonest moments. About who he is, as in other things, Bush has not lied. It has been conservatives who have lied to themselves about what Bush is all about. Conservatives are bitterly disappointed but have no right to be so. He is what he is--a good man and a decent man, no doubt. He's a man with an enormously difficult task and I think, generally speaking, he has done what he could. I find it difficult to assault him because I do not feel betrayed by him. He never promised us a conservative rose garden. Think back to the primaries of 2000 and recall the main reasons why conservatives supported him. Was he considered a pillar of Reagan conservatism then? No, we just thought he was better than most and, more important, that he could win. And, there was always a sense of his strong character and even a stubbornness that we have alternately admired and found irritating.
She's absolutely right about this, I think. Not only is Bush not an ideological conservative, he never professed to be one. He has not misled people as to what they should expect from him. What he said he would do in his campaigns he has tried to do, and what he has done that conservatives don't like, he never gave any indication that he wouldn't do. He has been perhaps the most transparent president in my memory.
All of which makes it all the more remarkable that so few people in this country are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says he didn't lie to us about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Bush, like Clinton before him, really believed that Saddam had them or was working to get them, and everything that Saddam did simply reinforced that belief. Yet Bush is still reviled by the obtuse left which can't seem to comprehend the simple fact that a man can be wrong without being a liar.
