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| Bush is not the problem and Kerry is not the answer Dept. | | Date Created: Jul 13, 2006, 08:33 PM |
There really is seldom a reason to write things up yourself. Someone has already or at some point will write it up for you. Maybe if I could say it better it would be worth it.
Here's an article from the latest issue of Liberty magazine entitled, "George Bush: Darling of the Liberals" by Jon Harrison. It says what the real problem is and the author has a similar pessimistic view of what to do about it and what may happen.
http://www.libertyunbound.com/archive/2006_08/harrison-bush.html
"Other people have made the point that the Republican Party under George W. Bush is a party of big government. 7 Their construct holds that Republicans want a different kind of big government from the Democrats. Essentially, this means that Republicans prefer more defense spending and corporate welfare, while Democrats want to expand social programs. But is even this perceived difference between the two parties significant, or for that matter, real? Given the growth in spending and entitlements under the current president (with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress), one cannot help but see the gap between Republicans and Democrats narrowing, almost to the vanishing point. We live today in a country supposedly dominated by conservative (if not quite classically liberal) principles, where the practices of modern, big-government liberalism prevail. Perhaps this should not surprise us. When great issues divide nations, principles actually mean something. They mean something because the energies of individuals are behind them. But when great issues disappear (the collapse of Soviet power, which carried the Cold War with it) or seem to be settled (the general agreement that government will have a large role in American life), those energies dissipate. Then there is nothing left but the cutting of the cake. How will the national product be divided? How will parties and politicians obtain the money necessary to win and keep power?
These are purely practical matters that shelter behind the rhetoric of policy and principle. It is no cause for astonishment that attempts to reform lobbying or the financing of political campaigns fail again and again, that somehow money always finds new channels to its recipients. The exposure of a Jack Abramoff or a Duke Cunningham changes nothing, for now only money matters. Politicians exhaust themselves raising the money they require to win the elections that determine who controls the money that government collects and then distributes, the collection and distribution of money having become government’s principal reason for existence. And those who benefit from government largesse are, naturally, quite willing to return a small portion of the money they receive to the campaign kitty (or the congressman’s pocket) in order to keep the game going. Naive idealists, like Sen. John McCain, believe this vicious cycle can be broken by legislative tinkering. They have, repeatedly, been proven wrong.
Money has always meant power. But today money is all-powerful; ideas and principles are mere window-dressing. This is not cynicism. It is the reality of American politics and government in the early 21st century. The 1994 “Contract With America” election was the last to be fought (even partly) over ideas and principles. Since 1994 it has all been about the money.
Only when the money that government dispenses starts to dry up, and government of necessity shrinks, can there be real change. The prospect of national bankruptcy, visible though still distant, may one day be enough to cause Congress and the executive to reduce, voluntarily and in a significant way, the flow of money that cycles from government to beneficiary, then back again. But given what we have witnessed since 1994, and especially since 2000, it will probably require actual insolvency to bring an end to the game.
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George W. Bush, the “compassionate conservative” ultimately responsible for most of the errors and follies of the past five years, will soon exit the political scene. We can say with confidence that his policies will one day find their rightful place in the wastebasket of history. But even the most superficial analysis reveals that our problems go deeper than Mr. Bush. We must admit that the root problem is not this president but the American people themselves, together with the political class that they have, with their votes, created.
The people as well as the politicians have been corrupted by the culture of big government bequeathed to them by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The New Deal-Great Society “consensus” that government is the answer to virtually all our problems remains largely intact, despite the Republican electoral landslides of 1980, 1984, and 1994. It is difficult to see how either people or politicians can be weaned off the debilitating drug that is modern, big-government liberalism. A financial meltdown, brought on by the cavalier fiscal policies of the federal government, will be the most likely instrument of change." |
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