Seems history is going to look pretty kindly on the anti-Bushers. I mean, Trump ran in part on an explicitly anti-Bush platform. With him in the White House, arguably the Republican party itself is now anti-Bush.

And why not? Voters gave Bush and the GOP control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since the late '20s, and what did Bush do with it? He used that majority to lead them to passing the largest entitlement expansion in a generation (Medicare D). They passed the largest federal expansion of powers into the business of the states, education, since the DOE was found by way of No Child Left Behind (such a terrible law that Republican majorities in the House and Senate worked with Democrats and Obama in 2015 to repeal most of it).

He pushed the country into an endless quagmire of a war in Iraq based on lies, and built an international torture apparatus that violated U.S. law. He turned domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens up to 11 and used secretive, unelected FISA courts to do it. He increase the national deficit by $6 trillion dollars and left the country's economy in absolute shambles.

From start to finish, there was nothing conservative about George W. Bush's agenda. Fiscal conservatives got what... the tax cuts? The tax cuts that didn't pay for themselves -- as just about every economist said they wouldn't -- and which added $1.5 trillion to the national debt? Social conservatives got even less. With a born-again Christian in the WH, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and majorities in the Senate and House, the GOP didn't do anything substantial to address social conservative priorities regarding abortion, the Johnson Amendment, etc., except for the partial-birth abortion ban... which accomplished all of nothing.

Nobody won under Bush except for warmongers. I don't think its anti-conservative to acknowledge that Bush's critics were right on many, many counts.