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The sad thing is how the past 13-14 years turned the US conservative movement into first the Attack Clinton movement then the W Apologist movement. Just think with me for a little bit on this...
Rush Limbaugh was on the verge of an epiphany back in 1991 and early '92. He knew the first President Bush couldn't beat Clinton. He knew it. Bush wasn't a conservative. He wasn't a great leader on any measure. He was a lifetime administrator who was helpless when the country needed leadership. He was out of touch when the job market was dead and people were rioting in LA. Bush was detached enough from what mattered to lose heaps of centrist votes. And he was idiot enough to have Dan Quayle as his right-hand man. Good Lordy, that was reason enough to dump Bush. Imagine Quayle in the Oval Office, in an emergency? He'd be almost fine touring Brownie Scouts through the White House (probably say something inadvertently offensive), but that's about it.
The Gingrich movement persuaded the GOP it could spent the bulk of Clinton's two terms trying to destroy him, without recourse. They wasted the better years of the longest peacetime expansion failing to make any important policy at a time when it really mattered. They also reduced the office of the president to a base level in terms of what kind of treatment the President should expect from the opposing party. This was a precedent we'll live to regret over and over. All this horrific propaganda about the corruption of our president had a greater impact outside the United States than it did here, where Clinton remains amazingly popular, and where books from Bill and Hillary sold on a "Harry Potter scale." Ah, but outside the country, the GOP-supplied image of our evil president, the Clinton Chronicles bovine hockey and the like, was highly saleable to Islamic extremists seeking to paint America as the Great Satan.
This process turned the 2000 election into a limbo contest. We elected this chuckling buffoon simply because he was a Bush (like that was a spotless heritage) and because he had an operator like Dick Cheney to make sure business gets done. All the way, from his primary campaigns through the election, his staff's lies about dirty tricks by the outgoing administration that never happened, his early attempts to cover for Enron, the dreaded "crusade" talk post 9/11, the spin of Saddam revenge as an anti-terror act, Colin Powell's puppet act at the UN, trashing of the Constitution and the civil liberties we hold so dear in the name of anti-terrorism, the slimey 2004 re-election campaign and unfair and wreckless defamation of John Kerry's character, on and on and on...
The conservative movement is reduced to apologizing for the administration's actions and trying to redefine them into something America should support. All the while this depletes energy from the original thrust of yes, somewhat, palatable conservatism. Conservatives used to want smaller government but yet was not in the business of deliberately screwing the poor and middle class. Conservatives wanted less wasteful red tape interfering with business (but not a negligent government unaware of scandalous corruption). Conservatives wanted balance between ecological protection and the needs of people (balance not one-sided pillage and overt distortion of science for tawdry political gain). They wanted America to be the most powerful military force on the planet (a force for good, not for adventurism, or meddling in regional conflicts, or imposing an arrogant, narrowly conceived will on our friends). They wanted to defeat communism with our prosperity (not to watch new China turn and threaten to sweep us aside while we offer whimpers of protest).
Fox News is a symptom of the conservative apology. It feeds its minions a daily dose of "How to Abandon What You Believed Yesterday to Support What You Have to Believe Today." Fox News is fun for righties--the channel where you're never wrong, as long as you forget what you were thinking as soon as the story's rewritten. Cheerleaders are supposed to be for the home team. Fox News is cheerleading for the right. This does not work forever. Eventually the truth creeps too far for the spin doctors to cover. Not sure when it happens--the midterm elections, surely by 2008--but in due time a good number of people will feel betrayed by Fox News just as they were betrayed by the amoral, soulless Newt Gingrich. Attack dog politics does not create good policy out of thin air. Eventually government must be run, decisions must be made, and decisions made entirely from expediency do nothing about the long term. The center of what matters can shift wildly in eight years of inattention. Look at 1992. Look at 2000. What goes around, comes around, and hopefully Dems will pounce on the current disaproval of Bush and the Republican party in general.
Conservatives need to detach themselves from the apology engine and start caring again about whether the government is making progress. We just went through the greatest four-year increase in business red tape in our lifetimes. A Republican did this to us. We allowed China to gut the post-recession recovery of industrial jobs while it held its currency exchange rate at an artificially low level, making Chinese labor grossly underpriced. A Republican did this to us. Dubya chose to flex his backbone against Afghanistan and Iraq, while Bin Laden is still at large, and we're not a damn whit safer. What would Reagan do? Not this. We continue to build Cold War military platforms, which in reality make us weaker, wasting resources because no one in Washington has the political heft to crush pork barrel programs. The government's science programs are treated as a policy arm of the administration, damaging progress in the name of politics. Hordes of college grads in Asia are more than willing to take up the slack. When cheap labor and resources are no longer America's strengths, science and technology will be all we've got. But look at the morass NASA has become, a vestigial limb that only gets publicity when a shuttle explodes in mid-air. Our President's grand plan for health care reform is something more costly than the hated Hillary Clinton ever dreamed, the Medicare drug benefit, which will create a price elasticity demand explosion in prescription drug use without any possible way of paying for it. A Republican did this to us. And conservatives cheered him on, ignoring everything they believe in. We got this ridiculous effort at reforming public schools, which puffs up the curriculum with noninstructional hoohah, forcing teachers into months of panic-mode teaching to the tests. A Republican did this to us.
King George 43 has enacted some of the biggest-government ideas in the history of human government, and today's conservatives hardly batted an eye. Government has actually increased during the last 5 years and a surge of socialism benefiting only the top tax bracket has ocurred. They lost the reflex to protest against their own. I am a Democrat, and a liberal Democrat at that. But regardless of poltical affiliation, it is sad to see a large group of people abandon policies and tradition in some damn "survival of the fittest" race to the political finish line. That is the sad thing to me. Anything goes in today's Republican party. Whether it be stripping a woman's reproductive rights--- or eliminating possibilities for the needy to get out and make something of themselves in the form of a college degree. Who is a real conservative? What is the meaning of that word? You certainly can't define it by the word "Republican." Not that I really care-- but I do care that these people are Americans-- and it is sad to see American's abandon their core values to due injustice toward others. And that is exactly what today's "conservatives" are doing.
Today is the day people. We have to jump on them now and expose them for what they really are, and ride the Democratic wave until November 2006. It'll carry us to victory. A blue nation is there for the taking. Carpe diem, my fellow Democrats.
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