Now the White House's apologists have concluded that they can no longer ignore the conservative revolt and have begun a belated counterattack. The Oct. 9 issue of The Weekly Standard has an article by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam that attempts to defend President Bush from his conservative critics, including me. At best, it is a case of too-little-too-late.

The gist of their argument is that conservatives have no right to complain about the orgy of federal spending on Bush's watch because he never pretended to be a small government kind of guy. Go back to his speeches in 1999 and 2000, Douthat and Salem say, and you will see that he has always had an expansive view of government. "Compassionate conservatism" was never about cutting government, but always about using government aggressively to promote Bush's agenda.

I agree up to a point. Rereading Bush's old campaign speeches does indeed indicate a strong pro-government bias. But at the time, I and most other conservatives thought this was just empty campaign rhetoric, not a true reflection of his governing philosophy. I should have listened more closely to my friend Ed Crane of the Cato Institute, who always said that Bush was a phony baloney conservative.

But whether Bush accurately telegraphed his big government policies doesn't insulate him from the tragic consequences of them. As Heritage Foundation analyst Brian Riedl and others have documented, not only has federal spending ballooned under this administration, even after adjusting for national defense and homeland security, it is going to continue growing for decades because of actions taken by it.

In particular, the ill-conceived Medicare drug benefit will raise federal spending by 1.1 percent of the gross domestic product forever -- equivalent to $150 billion this year and every year thereafter in inflation-adjusted terms, according to Medicare's trustees. And according to press reports, this huge federal largess is not even helping Republicans at the polls. Basically, they sold their souls for nothing.

History will eventually determine who is right: conservative critics of Bush and congressional Republicans, or their apologists. It will take a lot more evidence than Douthat and Salem have presented to convince me that Bush hasn't been an unmitigated disaster for conservatism.