The Tangled Webs the Republicans Weave

Republicans on the Hill have suddenly found their fiscally conservative sea legs, raising question after question about the size of Obama's fiscal stimulus bill, and sounding off about burgeoning deficits. Strange. For the last eight years not a peep, hardly a whimper from them, while spending increased year after year under the Bush administration, with nary a veto in sight. Republicans, when confronted with the budget deficit created under their watch, cited increased national defense spending in the wake of September 11 as the overriding factor. Fair enough.

Strange, though, that these same Republicans on the Hill are so eager to call the Democrats to account for forgetting that we're still in a war. Following this logic, don't we need to keep spending? Why go miserly now?

Perhaps, as is so often the case in politics, the suddenly spendthrift Republican attitude has surfaced mainly because the other party now holds the purse strings. And so the minority party rediscovers the problem of budgetary deficits, while the majority soon spends, and spends, and spends again.

Hold the Phone

For anyone who remembers the foundering hopelessness of Democrats after President Bush's reelection in 2004, after the simultaneously stentorian and soporific John Kerry failed to deliver, we'd all be wise to take a chill pill before expatiating on the death of the Republican party.

American politics is cyclical, like democratic politics generally; back and forth between our two parties we always go. No need to dig deep into history tomes to get this, just read Wikipedia entries for a few minutes about past elections and it'll become clear. The elephant will return; I hope thoroughly modernized and with a clear, inclusive message that resonates and especially inspires.

At any rate, even if President-elect Obama is a two-termer (of course way too early to prognosticate about this), it's hardly that long in the wilderness for those roaming Dinosaur Republicans, when put in historical context. So, enjoy the moment, Salon. But chill. You don't want some new era of journalistic gloaters to dig up those now-embarassing backlogged 2008 articles, injecting them with glee into future discussions about Republican reemergence. Back and forth we go.

The Closing of the Republican Mind

William F. Buckley, as reported in Newsweek after his death:

"In his old age, he told his son, "I spent my entire life separating the right wing from the kooks." Though it cost him contributors and readers, he banned conspiratorial members of the John Birch Society from the pages of National Review along with the anti-Semites who had stained the far right."

How about now, today, someone steps forward to help strip off the anti-intellectual clothes that have come to adorn, under the false guise of philosophical conservatism, the Republican party?

Folksy is as folksy does; the Repulbican party desperately needs conservative leaders who understand and properly promulgate conservative ideals. What happened? Suddenly big government, huge deficits, a kind of (and this hurts the worse) country singer, "don't know much about" mentality that ceeds our national debate to political liberals who have taken the time to become educated? And nowhere, not even the whisper of suggestion that there are some worthy principles undergirding a conservative (also, for the most part, libertarian) worldview. What happened? Republicans, have, really, closed their minds, and lost their way.