One of the country's most well-known progressive commentators on how--and why--the conservative movement went off the rails
According to even Newt Gingrich, "Republicans have lost their way." Always better with one-liners than worthwhile policies, John McCain recently said, "We spent money like a drunken sailor. Although I never really knew a sailor, drunk or sober, with the imagination of my colleagues."
Bill Press, however, says the Republicans have been governing exactly the way you'd expect. If a politician's most basic belief is that government always fails, why would anyone think he'd try to prove otherwise? Trainwreck details the rise of the modern conservative movement from Robert Taft to Ronald Reagan and its fall from Newt Gingrich to the abject failure of George W. Bush.
Once champions of fiscal responsibility, conservatives have brought us, instead, record high federal spending and bloated budget deficits. Once leery of foreign entanglements, conservatives have launched us, instead, into an unprecedented age of imperial wars and conquests. Once apostles of honesty and integrity in government, conservatives have, instead, used their positions of power to enrich themselves or evade the rule of law.
For decades, conservatives struggled to topple liberals from the federal throne, but, once in power, they didn't deliver. Everything they touched, they trashed. Here is the story of who, how, and why.
