Conservative Means What?

Newest item on the Conservative agenda is an old item--de-funding the US Agency for International Development.  I guess they see this as a waste of money and a bunch of hippies spreading cash among the corrupt third world types.  I guess they have not been reading the news/reports from Iraq and Afghanistan where USAID has been a key component of the COIN effort.  See here for a good rant about what they are missing and putting it into perspective--the money going into USAID vs money spent on Defense.  Given how hand-in-glove USAID has been with the US (and Canadian, and probably other) armed forces, it is strange to see Conservatives be so anti-national security.

I do enjoy the irony that conservative used to mean something about resistant to change, making hard-nosed by reasonable decisions about budgets, but now it pretty much means unreasonable, unthinking, knee-jerk opposition to anything that does not fit into their increasingly narrow ideology.  I do think there will be a reckoning within the GOP over how far to the right they can go.  We might not be there yet, but it is not that far away either.