Incoherent Interface

I don't understand these people at all. It's one thing to lie, but it's something else again to try to have everything both ways, to the point where one's message becomes totally incoherent.

Such is the case when conservatives try to put daylight between themselves and Bush, now that there's a consensus on this utterly failed presidency. It started when the election was heating up. There was a bit of standard rhetoric going around that when push came to shove, McCain and his crew would try to establish six degrees of separation between the candidate and Bush, although as Atrios points out "I never believed this because for 8 years the entire identity of the conservative movement was George Bush. There was no way to do it."

And there still isn't any way to do it, but that doesn't stop them from trying.

Yesterday, TalkingPointsMemo spoke with David Keene, the chairman of the CPAC-organizing American Conservative Union and a former aide to Bob Dole, who suggested that conservatives have been frustrated with Bush for years. He said criticism of Bush was “consistent with the belief we’ve had for some time.”

Uh-huh. Is that why the same Dave Keene just last year was so filled with "delight" that Bush would be addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference? Is that why he said that Bush speaking at the conference was “a great opportunity for thousands of conservatives to evaluate the accomplishments of his administration.”? Is that why when Bush stood up in front of them, the assembled conservatives were rapturously on their feet chanting "Four More Years!"?

Yet they still keep trying to push this "Bush is no REAL conservative" veshch, along with "we've had differences with him for oh-so-long," and I've even seen it crop up occasionally on this board. I knew when I saw it, I'd seen everything.

People like this seem to think that the rest of us will never notice that the narrative they're attempting to construct is so full of self-contradictions that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There's no way you can have a debate with anyone as completely incoherent as this, and my only question is, do they think they're being clever, or are they truly delusional?