I’ll grant you that a lot of people on the right were not paying the close attention to the excesses of the Bush administration as they should have, or simply refused to listen to criticism of his administration because they regarded him as a fundamentally decent man who, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the criticism was wrapped up in or consisted in its entirety of ugly and disgusting slanders against the man personally, attacks motivated more by a deeply disturbed and obsessive hatred of the man more than any actual concern with civil administration or national leadership. But as polls showed, dissatisfaction with his performance (and that of the Republicans in Congress) grew over time — something to which many Republicans can attest personally, their own opinions of Bush and the GOP having soured over things like the Harriet Miers fiasco and the arrogant and insulting intransigence over the border fence.

With the mitigating factor of party loyalty now gone, and the White House and Congress alike in the hands of the Democrat Party, a lot of Republicans are more cognizant of the dangers of federal excess and overreach than they were before — which is only natural, since part of the job of the opposition party is keeping tabs on the actions of the party in power.

However, the big wakeup call has been the trillions of dollars in borrowed money flushed down the drain recently. Whatever reckless spending the GOP Congress and Bush administration engaged in prior to January 2007, it was dwarfed by the outrageous pork spending and bailouts over the past five months (a period which includes both Bush and Obama administrations and two Democrat-controlled Congresses).

You might want to look up the concept of an “asymptote”. It aptly describes the rate of growth of federal spending, the corresponding rate of growth in the national debt, and the resulting growth in concern over and opposition to federal profligacy and overreach shared by citizens like those who attended yesterday’s tea parties.

(Roll Call) — Roll Call newspaper reports that House Democratic leaders on Wednesday “shrugged off” efforts to turn April 15 into a day of “nationwide ‘tea parties’ aimed at protesting tax hikes and wasteful spending.”

In an interview on FOX TV in San Francisco, “Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) chalked up the GOP grass-roots effort as ‘AstroTurf.’ … ‘This initiative is funded by the high end; we call it AstroTurf, it’s not really a grass-roots movement.”

The story goes on to report that one senior Democratic aide “has been circulating a document to the media that debunks the effort as one driven by corporate lobbyists and attended by neo-Nazis.”

The tea parties are “‘not really all about average citizens,’ the document continues, saying neo-Nazis, militias, secessionists and racists are attending them.”

Funny – I was at the Tax Day Tea Party in Denver, and didn’t observe a single Neo-Nazi, militia member, secessionist or racist. Maybe they were stealthily infiltrating the crowd while disguising their true identity and affiliation?

Oh, wait – that was the Leftists! My bad…