axe.jpg 

While standing in the checkout line at the local grocery store the other day, I saw the front cover of a recent issue of Time magazine.  It showed a pensive Ronald Reagan, an apparently Photoshopped tear trickling down his face, under the header "How The Right Went Wrong", the title of an article by Karen Tumulty explaining that Republicans had abandoned their core principles, much to their detriment:  "The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan's legatees."

Ahem.

Dearest TRex:  Might I borrow your axe, please?  There are waterheads among us, and they must be dealt with.

Tumulty is, I am sorry to say, so very full of shit, and she knows it — or should.  The Republicans did not "abandon" Reagan's — or Nixon's — principles.  On the contrary.  The policies of Bush are the full flowering of the anti-tax, anti-poor-people, big-business-is-God, trash-the-public-trust, authoritarian mindset that is Republicanism at its core.   In fact, the Bush Junta, from stem to stern, is stuffed chock-full of people who used to work for Reagan, Nixon, or (in the case of Cheney and Rumsfeld) both.  

Tumulty writes sorrowfully that Bush and his fellow current Republicans have embraced big government — but admits that so did Reagan, as David Stockman kept lamenting.  (Speaking of David Stockman, guess who's in trouble for committing a little investment-related fraud?  What was that about 'fiscal responsibility' again, David?)  

In fact, the differences between Bush, Reagan and Nixon are not ones of kind, but merely of degree.  When I read her lamenting the growth of deficits under the Self-Alleged 'Party of Fiscal Responsibility', I have to ask:  Has Tumulty never heard of Grover Norquist?  Of course she has.  He gleefully preaches the running up of huge deficits in order to force cuts in the kind of government spending that doesn't readily profit big corporations:  Namely, social spending.  Meanwhile, the military budget — and the money spent on corporate welfare in the form of defense contracts — soars along with the deficit.

I'm not sure what's worse:  Pretending not to know this, or actually not knowing this.  But once again, I am forced to remember the words of Upton Sinclair:  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it!"

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