George W. Bush spoke at the opening of a new pavilion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last week. He tried to claim the Reagan legacy as his own, perhaps in an attempt to shore up his sliding popularity by associating himself with the most popular president in U.S. history.

This struck me as hugely (and ironically) appropriate. And it made me giggle.

Reagan had a consistent approach to government based on three core ideas: opposition to the USSR, fiscal restraint (this was very nuanced and was not about fiscal restraint exclusively but extended to the goal of killing the welfare state), and family values. Since Reagan, the Republican party has tried to carry on that legacy — however, the war on terror cannot occupy the crucial psychological turf that communism and the USSR occupied in the American pysche, and fiscal restraint has turned out to be much more difficult than Regan anticipated. That leaves Republicans with just the family values part of the Reagan vision, and while they have made much of it (see the 2004 election for proof), it is an awkward, stupid, cruel, and heartless version of Reagan’s legacy.

In many ways, our current president is the most perfect embodiment of this crippled Reagan legacy. His entire presidency has been an ongoing attempt to reinvigorate the Reagan approach, by turning communism into terror, fiscal restraint into tax cuts for the rich, and family values into action. Even his folksy, man-of-the-people persona is a riff on Regan’s grandpa-of-the-nation image. Bush is a shell, a caricature, of Reagan and exemplifies exactly how awry the Republican party has gone since the end of the Reagan era. They have done a good job hiding their small-spirited aimlessness by cloaking it in a hate-soaked family values rhetoric. But it’s time for us to understand the Republican party as the lost dog that it is.

They have no new ideas. I’m not sure they have any ideas at all.