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WAIT don't go away yet. It's Frum. Frum, the former conservative think-tanker and Bush admin guy, who has suffered pretty dearly for not following his party into complete and utter insanity. I am posting his very long and very comprehensive essay (*not a 'nope' sign) here because it articulates things that need to be articulated and good god man
quote:I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.
America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.
It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by The Wall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic-recovery program.
I just want more critical review of the GOP in its current form to jolt people, because that's important. This is a party invested with the capacity to endanger us all and ruin our future by gridlocking government as if to hold it hostage. To not recognize and respond to this is the best way to turn America into an aged, mouldering economic has-been with crumbling and rusty infrastructure. Yes I'm doomsaying shutup
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I thought it was a pretty good review. I wonder sometimes if I really became this left wing or if the right wing just became more crazy.
Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: I thought it was a pretty good review. I wonder sometimes if I really became this left wing or if the right wing just became more crazy.
Can only one of those things be true?
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Well, compare yourself to David Frum! he didn't become more left wing! He just effectively became persona non grata in the party for not becoming a pod person or drinking the kool-aid or whichever They Live analogy is most appropriate these days.
ALSO SEE: the response of the right to Charles Johnson.
Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009
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I guess it finally happened and I'm posting as Parks??
/ hi im parkour im completely insane, i try to break at least seven bones per year (4 on camera) because just watching other people do it isn't exciting enough
Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009
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posted
Some of that surprised me. You'd think Fox News would have them just as informed about the primaries as anything.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I suspect it has less to do with Fox's presentation of the news, and more to do with selection bias. People who choose to watch Fox (especially people who watch Fox exclusively) probably don't watch to be informed, they watch to reinforce their already held views. I think that is, to a great extent, why Fox is popular in the first place.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
There's also the issue that misinformation doesn't increase a person's informed state. The intentional emphasis of an ideological narrative can decrease a person's informed status much more readily than not paying attention to news at all.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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After claiming Republican control of both houses of Congress in 1995 — for the first time in 40 years — Gingrich launched his new army of reformers on a project to secure permanent control of that institution, and of government. Fundraising was the key to that strategy of control. The Republicans came to power raising a then unheard of amount of money: $618.42 million in the election cycle ending in 1994, compared to the Democrats' $488.68 million.
In the four years between 1994 and 1998, Republican candidates and party committees would raise over $1 billion. Never before had a party come anywhere close to raising that amount of money, because never before had any party's leaders so effectively focused the energy of their members on this single task: fundraising.
Gingrich concentrated the "work" of Congress into a three-day "work" week. He sent his caucus home for the rest of the week, in part so that they had time necessary to launch cross-country fundraising missions.
He exploded the number of committees, radically increasing the number of fund-raising targets. He ended any idea of bipartisanship. Instead, as Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee, has described, the focus of Congress after Gingrich's reforms became the "majority of the majority," (i.e., the majority of the Republicans) polarizing the institution to the end of assuring ever more loyal and energized troops. Members of Congress now spend between 30%-70% of their time raising money to get re-elected to Congress or to get their party back into power. And not just the Republicans: The Democrats quickly followed the lessons of Professor Gingrich. And in the almost 20 years since he came to power, practically everything about that great institution has changed.
Gone is any semblance of deliberation, or the idea that there is a business of the nation to be done, as opposed to the business of the party in power. Instead, the institution that Gingrich inherited — the one in which Democrats worked with Republicans to pass the most important tax reform in modern history (Reagan's), and in which Republicans led Democrats to break a filibuster in the Senate and pass the most important social legislation in a century (The Civil Rights Act of 1964) — was gone. What replaced it is the completely dysfunctional institution which practically no American has confidence in today.[/quote]
Just another wonderful thing for you to love about the guy. To some degree, we can credit him as one of the godfathers (if not THE godfather?) of our permabroken congress!
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Not sure if this has its place here but I just had a conversation online where someone literally felt that being critical of the US and its foreign policy was the same thing as believing that the US is capable of stealing Canadian snow, as in if you believe the latter its only logical to believe the latter.
quote:Just another wonderful thing for you to love about the guy. To some degree, we can credit him as one of the godfathers (if not THE godfather?) of our permabroken congress!
I've been saying for years that Newt's "contract with America" would have been better named "contract on America".
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