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.
Posted by: Rob | Thursday, 29 September 2005 at 07:01 PM
I'm not a registered Republican either, although I usually end up voting that way. Nor am I a straight-line conservative, since I strongly oppose the "war on (some) drugs" and a few other things that most conservatives support. I'm a "small-l" libertarian (meaning I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party, which is a little kooky nowadays)--the important things to me are individual freedom, small government, that sort of thing. Most conservatives believe in those too, so we generally get along just fine. Usually. ;o)
Posted by: Obi-Wan | Thursday, 29 September 2005 at 11:24 PM
Posted by: Rob | Friday, 30 September 2005 at 09:00 AM
In other words, thanks!
Posted by: Obi-Wan | Friday, 30 September 2005 at 03:37 PM