President Bush, once a wily "compassionate" conservative who passed the largest recent expansion in government health insurance and radically broadened the authority of the federal Department of Education, which Ronald Reagan threatened to destroy, has become predictable. Why? He's gotten religion on the principles of the hard right, whose blind pessimism about government makes them propose the same anti-government solutions for every problem. Wednesday's press conference on the economy was only the latest example. Economy in trouble? Can't do anything about that! Infrastructure failing? Cut programs! Of course, it's hard to trust someone whose ideas have undergone an about-face. But it's even harder to trust someone who revises his ideas completely, and then says the exact same thing over and over. They don't understand what the problem is. How ironic and absurd it is that just as the problems of "starving the beast" are becoming obvious to everyone, President Bush and much of the Republican party have taken a hard turn towards the right and advocated even less funding regardless of circumstance. Government failures -like at the FDA, Walter Reed, the Minnesota bridge collapse, even the slow Katrina recovery- have shown that too many federal programs do not have enough funding to perform effectively. As this op-ed in the Buffalo News shows, Bush's proposed program cuts would harm real people. But Bush and the anti-government types in Congress just doesn't get it. Or maybe they just don't care- call it Cruel Conservatism. Perhaps Bush should get some credit for standing up for principle, but any principle that would prevent us from fixing bridges that collapse and kill people is a strange one indeed.