Has it come to this? Not a choice -- but an echo?
By Aussiegirl
Mark Steyn asks some tough questions. Between the two parties -- where's the choice? Steyn joins a long list of conservative columnists who are suddenly asking the huge unasked question -- whither the Republican party under the leadership of George Bush and Karl Rove? He joins Peggy Noonan, Jonah Goldberg and Mona Charen in stating what has become obvious to all but the most die-hard Bush supporter -- something is seriously wrong with a party which is spending money with the wild abandon of a welfare queen with an unlimited fed-debit card. When Tom Delay states that there is absolutely no fat in the budget and that it has been "cut to the bone" -- you know you're in deep doo-doo. Next they'll be telling us that Vuitton bags for every hurricane survivor are a necessity of life that simply has to be part of the budget.
Politicians not giving us much of a choice
American politics seems to have dwindled down to a choice between a big government party and a big permanently-out-of-government party.
[...]That slab of meaningless emotive exhibitionism would make a good epitaph for the Democratic Party. The reality of life as a bigshot Dem is that what John Roberts is like "as a father" is less important than what George Soros is like as a sugar daddy. The more money shoveled at the party by Moveon.org, Hollywood, NOW and other unrepresentative fringes, the less it's able to see over the big pile of green to the electorate beyond. A party as thoroughly Sorosized as the Democrats is perforce downsized.
[...]These days one party raises a ton of money from George Soros and the other raises a ton of money from you. George Bush has committed to spending $200 billion on Gulf Coast "hurricane relief." The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore put the figure in perspective: There are supposedly half-a-million families displaced by Katrina. For $200 billion, you could give every family 400,000 bucks, and they could build their own beachfront home virtually anywhere in America except next door to Barbra Streisand's pad.
posted by Aussiegirl @ 2:45 PM
4 Comments:
Mark is right. When I watched Bush's speech 2 weeks ago I kept thinking I had voted for the new Jimmy Carter. Bush's only answers to all problems were: more quotas, spend more taxes. Just another liberal big government President. Still better than JFK but not as good a Clinton. Why has he made such a sharp left turn the last 6 months? Or was Bush always a liberal and I was too dumb to see how liberal he really is?
Aussiegirl, I was reading through the posts to this brilliant article by Steyn on Lucianne, and in the midst of all the knee-jerk, falling-on-the-sword, give-me-GW-or-give-me-death responses that substituted name-calling for analysis, I came across your post, short but so well-argued that I thought I'd paste it in here for others to read (since I knew you'd be too modest to quote it yourself): "To all those who resort to name-calling and ad-hominem attacks in lieu of a rational argument, you only betray your own paucity of ammunition. If the die-hard defenders of George Bush continue to purge anyone who dares to disagree, no matter how valid their conservative credentials by simply dismissing them as site-pests and Soros plants, then there will be precious little of the Republican party left. George Bush is not the Republican party -- and this is not some cult of personality which lives and dies on the hill of the Bush family dynasty. A party which crushes internal debate ultimately becomes an echo chamber of irresponsible and out of touch leadership, with the result we are seeing today. In my mind, the only grand stategery of Karl Rove has been the destruction of the Reagan Republican party as we have known it since the 80's. What's been put in it's place is 1970's era Democrat social welfare liberalism." (By the way, I noticed that once you had posted your intelligent comment, the tone of the following posts seemed to change and become a little more critical and less knee-jerky.)
Yes, unfortunately it has come to this that just when we should have a united party surging forward and implementing the conservative agenda we instead have a fractured party which doesn't know what it stands for. The hard-core, die-hard Bush supporters form a rump of the Republican party in some kind of cult of personality which has no place in the party, not unless the person around whom the cult is formed is someone of the stature of Reagan. I too wonder if I wasn't snookered by Bush - to a large extent we all saw what we wanted to see in him, because there wasn't much choice. But it's hardly a ringing endorsement to say that he's better than the alternative - i.e. - he's the un-Kerry -- as Kerry was the un-Bush. What a mess for the American voter to find himself in. No one knows where Bush is leading the party, nor what it stands for anymore, even the war on terror seems to amount to little more than exiting Iraq as quickly and as gracefully as possible, while Iran and North Korea happily pursue their nuke policies with nary a policy in sight from our administration. Condi Rice is also turning out to be, sadly, an affirmative action appointment. She has no experience and is proving herself to be naive in the extreme in her Middle East policy, in the old Scowcroft model. All in all, not a happy place for conservatives. Where to turn? Only time will tell. A third party may yet emerge, whether it's successful is another matter. One thing's for sure, the only thing that I can still say is that Bush's judicial nominees will be hopefully better than Kerry's would have been.
Thanks for the comments -- and thanks, Pindar for the nice quotes of part of my ongoing argument today on Lucianne.com. I'm afraid there is a wing of our party which seems to have learned the lessons of the left-wing too well and become bomb-throwers and hurlers of insult in place of rational argument.
The only real difference between the two old parties is this: Democrats are more nearly honest.
Oh, I can hear the gasps, the shrieks, the recitals of all the Democrat politicians in jail or who should be in jail.
Hear me out: Democrats tell us right up front, "Elect me and I'll raise your taxes, send your sons and daughters to fight in pointless wars and 'police actions,' impose racial quotas, and confiscate your property."
Republicans, on the other hand, swear they believe in the Constitution and individual rights.
Then, when in office, they raise our taxes, send our sons and daughters to fight in pointless wars and "police actions," impose racial quotas, and confiscate our property.
As I think you and others have pointed out, there are knee-jerk supporters of one party or the other who will defend to the death (ours not theirs) their particular candidate or party, accepting any distortion in support thereof, and calling names of the other.
I hope this is not a dead horse: We desperately need to quit resignedly accepting "the lesser of two evils."
Voting for any evil, even an alleged lesser, will only bring us an evil.
Whether Bush or Kerry was the lesser evil is really dependent on the emphasis of the beholder.
Either one, though, is and was an evil.
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