hello, Kettle. yeah, Pot here. um... you're black.

so just the other day, as my cohorts and i here at Reasonable Nuts are discussing who and what to permalink over there on the left side of the page (subject to change), i sorta dissed Ann Coulter as "too nutty" for officially pimping her work here. she is indeed a nut. but do you see the irony? hello, Kettle. yeah, Pot here. um... you're black.

she is indeed reasonable - unlike many (most?) of those about whom she chooses to write. i find that she is strangely at her most reasonable when she is agreeing with me. ;-)

such was the case yesterday, when tangentially making the case that our President is far from the conservative he claims to be, when judged by his endorsements. take for instance these observations:

In 2002, Bush backed liberal Richard Riordan in the Republican gubernatorial primary in California against conservative Bill Simon. This triggered a series of events that culminated in Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming the governor of California. But I don't think even liberals would claim Karl Rove had a plan for California voters to elect Democrat Gray Davis, erupt in a rage at him, and demand a recall election in which a famous Hollywood actor would enter the race and beat the sitting governor.
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In 2004, Bush backed liberal Republican Arlen Specter over conservative Pat Toomey in the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania. Bush still lost Pennsylvania and, worst of all, Specter won. So that worked out well.
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In 2004, Bush backed Mel Martinez for the open Senate seat in Florida and asked the magnificent Katherine Harris not to run against him, so she graciously bowed out. Martinez has since called on Bush to shut down Guantanamo. What's Spanish for "buyer's remorse"?
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This year, rumors have it that Bush is again discouraging the magnificent Harris not to run for the Senate. Here's hoping she ignores him. How much would Bush's support be worth to Harris at this point anyway? If Bush really wants to keep Katherine Harris out of the U.S. Senate, maybe he should just endorse her.
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Also this year, Bush is backing developmentally disabled Lincoln Chafee over the only Republican in the race, Stephen Laffey, Harvard MBA and mayor of Cranston, R.I. Chafee opposes Bush on taxes, Iraq, abortion and gay marriage. This man is literally too stupid to know he's a Democrat. If Chafee hadn't inherited hundreds of millions of dollars, he would be living in a shack tending weeds. In the last election, Chafee famously refused to vote for Bush, instead writing in Bush's father.

her overall point is not to lambaste Bush so much as to lay the case that strategist Karl Rove is not the conservative genius he is believed to be:

Karl Rove is Bob Shrum with a good cause. (Shrum has run eight presidential campaigns; number won: 0, number lost: 8.) Bush calls Rove the "architect" of his 2004 victory. In 2004, America was at war and the Democrats ran a gigolo to be commander in chief. The nation hasn't changed so much since Reagan was president that the last election should have even been close.

but in the process she casts serious doubt on a President who would:

1. hold conservative values in his mind and heart, yet go against those values at the behest of his political handlers. [animal most resembling: jellyfish]
2. as above, but not understand what sort of politicians this would lead him to endorse. [animal most resembling: any, fossilized]
3. merely claim to be conservative, while actually at root a neocon (short for neo-conservative or, in my estimation, NO-conservative. hmmm - nocon... it has a ring to it.). this would be something far more akin to his father (with his "new world order" mantra) than one would ever have thought when he intoned the name of Jesus Christ on stage in a debate. [animal most resembling: weasel, the animal most politicians resemble]