Senator Government is now President Government

I guess David Brooks lived in a hole under a rock in Ulan Bator until a few days ago. I can't think of any other way to explain his absurd March 2 column.

In tones of hurt bewilderment Brooks details his disappointment in Team Obama's budget and the amount of power it would concentrate in Washington DC.

There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once. So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget.

We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

All I can say (in tones of irritated annoyance) is "Where the hell were you during the campaign?"

Clearly David Brooks hasn't spent 2 minutes looking at Obama's history. To start with, you have John McCain's prophetic and amusing freudian slip during the debate, when he called Obama "Senator Government."

Go back a few months from that and read about how the conservative magazine National Review decided that Obama was the #1 Most Left Wing Senator In The World, based on 99 of his votes.

The rebuttal to that took the form of a study by Jeff Lewis and Keith Poole, two political science professors who maintain the Voteview website.

They looked at another selection of Senate votes and claimed National Review was full of beans. Obama was only tied for 10th most left wing senator. Given that there are only 100 Senators, this is still pretty left wing for my money.

And I feel obligated to point out that over a year ago, Lawrence Kudlow was screaming to anyone who would listen about Obama's big-government plans and the high taxes they would require.

So what happened? The truth is that David Brooks and the other moderate conservatives who supported Obama were so deranged by Bush that they refused to consider any Republican candidate.

Nice going, guys. Instead of McCain, a moderate Republican who was so willing to work with Democrats that half of his own party hated his guts, you elected Senator Government.