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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Road Walker who wrote (121889)9/27/2012 1:09:14 PM
From: tejek  Respond to of 149317
 
Still, the decline in estimated growth for the second quarter was due mainly to reduced farm production stemming from this summer's drought.

All Bernanke's fault, ask MM. Printing money made it stop raining.

You mean Bernanke aka Hitler? Yup. The guy killed the golden goose.



To: Road Walker who wrote (121889)9/27/2012 2:45:44 PM
From: tejek  Respond to of 149317
 
Interesting article from The American Conservative.........all of which is worth reading. The author puts a lot of blame on the teapers for the GOP's current problems but in truth the teapers are relatively new phenomenon. I think he's more on track when he blames on regional identity issues.

What's most interesting is the reasonable tone of the article.............he doesn't sound like a run of the mill winger.

Is the GOP Still a National Party?

[cut]

None of this has anything to do with the historic conservatism of Edmund Burke or John Adams, Russell Kirk or Robert Nisbet. It doesn’t even look like the capacious conservatism of Ronald Reagan. It’s a scam: it does little for values in the culture as a whole because the values in question are those of an ideological minority only interested in winning through minority-organization politics; it can’t look at big-picture economics because doing so would tick off the financial interests and get anyone who broached the question read out of conservatism by Wall Street’s coalition allies. A traditionalist or consistently libertarian critic would be perceived as speaking up for lazy immoral city-dwelling welfare queens. This fanciful identity politics, and not principled economics, is what lies behind talk about “socialism,” “big government,” and the “47 percent.” If the case were otherwise, you’d see the anti-dependency case made against the Pentagon, defense contractors, churches taking government money, and red-state recipients of all kinds of largesse. I don’t see Republicans talking about that, with a handful of exceptions whose last name is usually “Paul.”

I’m not the biggest fan of Eisenhower or Nixon, but they (and Reagan) are clearly preferable to this post-Reagan Republican Party. Those presidents won national majorities for a reason. They weren’t strict conservatives, but they certainly weren’t any less conservative than the Bushes, McCain, or Romney. They didn’t pretend they were going to abolish the welfare state — often, they didn’t even pretend they would cut the welfare state — unlike so many of today’s Republicans, who don’t follow through but do use their rhetoric to polarize. That gives us the worst of both worlds: big government plus the delusional sense within one party that it represents the antithesis of big government and may freely hate other Americans who don’t mouth the mantra. And what goes for big government goes for Judeo-Christian values, a strong national defense, and all the rest: the GOP’s rhetoric occupies a separate mental compartment from its actions, even as its voters and ideological apologists continue to believe that there is a profound moral difference between them and the rest of the country. It’s a losing strategy, and worse, it’s made the country ungovernable even as government grows.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of The American Conservative. Follow @ToryAnarchist.


theamericanconservative.com