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Andrew Sullivan calls John McCain's transparent lies about budgeting and tax cuts "the death of fiscal conservatism." "Conservatism," he says, "is about balancing the budget."

Erm - OK. When?

Take a look at the data and see for yourself. Since 1980, when conservative Republicans were in power, the deficit exploded. It was only during the one moment that they did not hold the White House - Clinton's 2 terms in office - that we saw major surpluses. Even LBJ, the man every conservative loves to hate as the prototype of "tax and spend liberalism," had nothing on so-called "fiscal conservatism."

Fiscal conservatism was a branding strategy and nothing more. It has absolutely no basis in reality. None.

Andrew loves to proclaim his conservatism of doubt, yet he takes it as an article of faith that conservatism was at some point responsible for balancing budgets. But it doesn't, and it never has. Never.

UPDATE: I've sent the following to Andrew via email. I'll update later if he responds:

Andrew,

You say that "conservatism is about balancing the budget." Perhaps as a slogan, but when in reality has it ever actually been the case? Since 1980, conservative administrations have been responsible for exploding deficits. Among conservative presidents, only HW tried to do something about the deficit, and he was practically disowned by conservative Republicans for it.

"Fiscal conservatism" was a clever branding strategy, nothing more. $9.1 trillion in debt, and all of it comes courtesy of "fiscally conservative" Republican administrations. Surely you can see that in the data, can't you?

Now might be a good time for you to remind your readers - and perhaps yourself - about The Atlantic's classic "The Education of David Stockman." Read through to the end and it becomes abundantly clear that even by 1981 the idea that conservative politicians wanted to balance the budget was a myth. And that's how we ended up in this mess. Faith and ideology took over for reason and analysis. Stockman and others like him simply assumed that they could impose their will on the political system. Congress? The bureaucracy? The media? The citizens of the country? If he and his fellow travelers worked hard enough, they could bend the entire system to their will.

Your conservatism may be fiscally responsible and full of doubt, but theirs was not. Had they truly been committed to balanced budgets, they would have admitted when their policies had failed and changed course. Supply side theories would have been acknowledged as incomplete. The abiding power of interest groups to block reform would have been taken into account. And most importantly, the inherent inability of humans to plan and predict causes and effects in advance would have been respected and acknowledged.

Stockman did all that, and like HW, he was excoriated by conservatives for it, forced out of the movement and to the sidelines. All by 1985.

1985.

How do you reconcile that with the statement that "conservatism is about balancing the budget?" How can you continue to make blanket statements like that when all of the available evidence suggests otherwise? Where is your conservatism of doubt on this?

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Some choice quotes from Reagan's fiscally conservative guru from that now classic article:

"The whole thing is premised on faith," Stockman explained. "On a belief about how the world works."

[...]

"None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," Stockman confessed at one point. "You've got so many different budgets out and so many different baselines and such complexity now in the interactive parts of the budget between policy action and the economic environment and all the internal mysteries of the budget, and there are a lot of them. People are getting from A to B and it's not clear how they are getting there. It's not clear how we got there and it's not clear how Jones is going to get there."

[...]

"l'm beginning to believe that history is a lot shakier than I ever thought it was," he said, in a reflective moment. "In other words, I think there are more random elements, less determinism and more discretion, in the course of history than I ever believed before. Because I can see it."

[...]

Stockman thought he had taken care of embarrassing questions about future deficits with a device he referred to as the "magic asterisk." (Senator Howard Baker had dubbed it that in strategy sessions, Stockman said.) The "magic asterisk" would blithely denote all of the future deficit problems that were to be taken care of with additional budget reductions, to be announced by the President at a later date. Thus, everyone could finesse the hard questions, for now.

[...]

"I have a new theory--there are no real conservatives in Congress..."

[...]

"The hard part of the supply-side tax cut is dropping the top rate from 70 to 50 percent--the rest of it is a secondary matter," Stockman explained. "The original argument was that the top bracket was too high, and that's having the most devastating effect on the economy. Then, the general argument was that, in order to make this palatable as a political matter, you had to bring down all the brackets. But, I mean, Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate."

[...]

That regret was beyond remedy now; all Stockman could do was keep trying on different fronts, trying to catch up with the shortcomings of the original Reagan prospectus. But Stockman's new budget-cutting tactics were denounced as panic by his former allies in the supply-side camp. They now realized that Stockman regarded them as "overly optimistic" in predicting a painless boom through across-the-board tax reduction. "Some of the naive supply-siders just missed this whole dimension," he said. "You don't stop inflation without some kind of dislocation. You don't stop the growth of money supply in a three-trillion-dollar economy without some kind of dislocation ... Supply-side was the wrong atmospherics--not wrong theory or wrong economics, but wrong atmospherics... The supply-siders have gone too far. They created this nonpolitical view of the economy, where you are going to have big changes and abrupt turns, and their happy vision of this world of growth and no inflation with no pain."
The "dislocations" were multiplying across the nation, creating panic among the congressmen and senators who had just enacted this "fiscal revolution." But Stockman now understood that no amount of rhetoric from Washington, not the President's warmth on television nor his own nimble testimony before congressional hearings, would alter the economic forces at work. Tight monetary control should continue, he believed, until the inflationary fevers were sweated out of the economy. People would be hurt. Afterward, after the recession, perhaps the supply-side effects could begin--robust expansion, new investment, new jobs. The question was whether the country or its elected representatives would wait long enough.

His exasperation was evident: "I can't move the system any faster. I can't have an emergency session of Congress to say, Here's a resolution to cut the permanent size of government by 18 percent, vote it up or down. If we did that, it would be all over. But the system works much more slowly. But what can I do about it? Okay? Nothing. So I'm not going to navel-gaze about it too long."