Ready to be an extremist again.(THE LAST WORD)(Column)

Back in September 2005, I wrote a short column for THE NEW AMERICAN stating that "I'm okay being middle-of-the-road." The column chronicled how acquaintances and family had mistaken my stinging criticisms of the policies of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress as evidence of an occasional leftward bent.

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If you are a conservative, conventional thinking goes, you can't criticize a Republican president. The worst a conservative is supposed to do is to grumble about how a Republican president is not conservative enough, and then note that at least he's better than the alternative. But I wasn't buying the party line.

Bush did more to erode the restraints of the U.S. Constitution than any president who preceded him, with direct attacks on the Bill of Rights' prohibitions on detainment without habeas corpus or trial, torture, and searches without a court warrant. He presided over Republican and Democratic Congresses that enacted the largest spending increases since FDR, and will leave office with the largest budget deficit in U.S. history. He made no effort to stop the spending madness that has ruined our economy, and did much to worsen it. He also left us embroiled in two disastrous foreign wars that killed far more Americans than September 11, and there's no end in sight.

There's absolutely no evidence he was better than the alternative. For pointing out these indisputable facts, I was called a "middle-of-the-roader," a libertarian, and even a liberal a couple of times.

I hadn't changed my views from when I had criticized the Clinton administration's big-government policies. Criticizing Clinton's big-government policies got me labeled a "right-wing extremist." I'm not a right-wing extremist, of course, but rather I'm a moderate, middle-of-the-road John Bircher who believes in limited government under the U.S. Constitution.

Later, when I criticized the Bush administration's even-bigger-government policies, I magically became a "middle-of-the-roader" or a "moderate" for saying exactly the same thing that got me labeled a "right-wing extremist."