En route to his book signing event last night in Raleigh, Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner chatted with Carolina Journal Radio. Among the topics was his assessment of so-called “big government” conservatives:

One of my colleagues has started handing out bottled water to every congressman he meets on the theory that, otherwise, they’ll drink too much of the Potomac River, and that somehow corrupts them. I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

I think what it is is they come to Washington, they see the old kind of way of thinking about things, the way liberals always have in terms of carving out the pork barrel and making sure we get our share, and so they kind of fall in the trap of believing that somehow big government is good government if it’s our government.

Well, conservatives shouldn’t believe that. We should all believe what Mr. Jefferson — from my home state of Virginia — said 200 and some years ago: “Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.”

And that’s what concerns me, that conservatives have just lost this sense of principle and this sense of doing the right thing once they’re up there.