Invasion of the Party Snatchers: A Very Inside Insider’s Scathing Criticism of Bush and the GO

Vic Gold was the featured speaker last Thursday at the CATO Institute. Vic Gold was deputy press secretary for Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, which launched the conservative revolution in the Republican Party. He went on to collaborate with President George H. W. Bush on his autobiography and to coauthor a satirical novel with Lynne Cheney. But today, he says, the Republican Party is run by people Barry Goldwater wouldn't recognize—some of whom are identified in his polemical subtitle. His new book is a lively jeremiad against "a fiscally irresponsible, ever-expanding federal government," a messianic foreign policy, a theocratic view of church and state, and a Republican Party that has accepted all those unconservative ideas. Via Scott Horton at Harper's, who says the speech "delivers a blistering assessment of the status of the GOP under George W. Bush and Karl Rove." CATO has provided video of the speech. CATO is a libertarian think tank, and Gold labors under a great many misapprehensions about Democratic philosophy. But especially given his intimacy with both the Bush and Cheney families, and his career working for Barry Goldwater and Spiro Agnew, his criticism is particularly noteworthy. He even draws an explicit parallel between the Bush administration's attitude towards government under the US Constitution and Hitler governing under the Weimar constitution!