From the latest print (dead-tree) version of National Review:
Perhaps the central liberal criticism of George W. Bush is that he used a national crisis as an opportunity to pursue partisan aims. Liberals do not seem to see that, to an outsider, this is exactly what the stimulus bill looks like: an attempt to use the financial crisis to enact every liberal spending wish of the last two decades. (The difference is that Democrats had input in the Patriot Act and the authorization-of-force resolution.) The political scientists John Pitney has calculated that between the introduction of the bill and its passage, Congress spent money at a clip of a million dollars a second. The next time a liberal spending program is proposed, we will have to ask: How worthless must this program be if it could not make it into the stimulus?
