Preach it, brother!

Via Short Final, Cleared to Land we find a column by Frank Cagle in Knoxville, TN's Metro Pulse.

Once there was a president from Texas whose party controlled both Houses of Congress. He was prosecuting an increasingly unpopular war at enormous cost while simultaneously launching huge new entitlement programs. He couldn’t pay for both guns and butter and ran enormous deficits as a result. It set the stage for a decade of inflation, slow growth and ridiculously high interest rates.

If any of you younger readers see anything familiar here, it’s a rotten shame. Older readers will recognize Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The similarities to the current occupant of the White House are troubling. George W. Bush has spent more than Johnson. He has never vetoed a spending bill. Under his watch we have gone from a surplus to a $2 trillion deficit. And we aren’t through yet. He now proposes to spend $200 billion to rebuild a city in a swamp without raising taxes and without cutting spending. House Majority Leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, another Texan who thinks big, argues that the federal budget is right where it needs to be and there is no place to cut.

Many Republicans are in the position of some sports fans for hapless teams: they still show up for games but wear paper bags over their heads.

Bush may still be popular with the branch of the Republican Party that only cares about abortion, stem-cell research and displaying the Ten Commandments, but the fiscal-conservative small-government don’t-tread-on-me wing of the party has had enough.

In 2006, all Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for reelection. They ought to be turned out in droves. Their conduct for the past six years has betrayed every promise they ever made about smaller, less-intrusive government and fiscal responsibility. They passed tax cuts, which in the old days meant less revenue, thus less government. But then they have passed one pork-laden bill after another. They have created new entitlement programs, and they have spent the Treasury dry. There are a few Republican House members who have insisted that savings be found to pay for hurricane relief. They are being “Hammered” for being heretics.

...If you Republican House members move quickly, maybe some of the people who traditionally vote Republican will stay with you. Otherwise, there will be no reason to keep any of you around. You see, you weren’t elected just because people like Republicans. You were elected because you are supposed to believe in something. If you insist on spending down our Treasury like a drunken Powerball winner, they don’t care what you call yourselves. You are a bunch of self-righteous, arrogant hypocrites. If you keep this up, some of us are going to get mad.

There's more to it than this—read it all.  Then, get mad and call or write your own hypocrite congressman.

Comments

[Rob]

Hope I don't get kicked off your blog for this... but, I'm not a Republican. Not officially. Like the majority of traditional Democrats, I've had to watch the party slowly drift away and become a Clintons fan-club. They left me behind and took the name so I'm left somewhat in the middle without an official title. I've been voting Republican lately since they are, as I like to call them "The New Democrats", but as was pointed out, they are doing the Democratic thing better than the Dem's did in their heyday. I wholeheartedly voted for Dub'ya and I think he did an awsome job as president in his first term. This second term I'm not so sure. Really, I haven't really seen that he's done anything of worth in his second term other then prosecuting the War on Terror. I thought the second term was where you "let it all hang out"? He seems to coasting into retirement.. Co'mon George! Make some waves! It's not like you're gonna run again.