Why Do Republicans Hate The Public Good?

Buried in an Al Kamen Washington Post column is the following:

A Lavish Bathroom at Interior

If Sen. Ken Salazar  (D-Colo.) is confirmed this month as interior secretary, he’ll have a snappy, scarcely used bathroom in his fifth-floor office, thanks to Dirk Kempthorne , the outgoing secretary.

Seems Kempthorne spent about $235,000 in taxpayer funds renovating the bathroom a few months ago, which included installing a new shower, a refrigerator and a freezer and buying monogrammed towels, department officials told our colleague Derek Kravitz.

A new shower I can see; bike commuting is increasingly popular in DC, and one can work up a sweat doing it in Washington’s legendary summers.  But a refrigerator and freezer?  In a bathroom?! What the hell was Kempthorne doing in there?

This is yet another example of how Republicans see government not as a public trust, but as a beast to bleed and starve and screw into the ground.

Why do they hate the public trust so much?  Look to the words of the late Lee Atwater, by way of Paul Krugman, for the answer:

… In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, folks.

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