"So, let's review a little history:
The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus -- with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit -- and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it.
To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration's swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit."
This was the easiest prediction from 2008--that once Bush was out of power, conservatives would suddenly remember the words "fiscal responsibility." But I am not sure I even anticipated the unbelievable gall of odious men like Karl Rove--people who worked closely with Bush on some of the worst policies with no transparency or oversight--now criticizing Obama on those same issues. Oh, and making up the facts as he goes.
If Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the best representation of the conservative base--anti-intellectual and fundamentalist, then Rove is the best representation of the cynical and openly dishonest and unethical wing of the party that actually made decisions during Bush's term. These are the people who actively worked to disenfranchise people of color, or created fraudulent vote fraud cases to present around election time, or who worked on science panels to undermine science.
It has to be one of the most glaring contradictions in history that the people most draped in Biblical conservatism and "moral values" have instituted some of the least Biblical and least moral policies in American history. All, I might reiterate, at the cheering of the evangelical right.
3 comments:
Not conservatives, Republicans. Conservatives always have fiscal responsibility. It's just that Republicans stopped being conservative and that ushered in the era of Obama.
Mike, I think that is a convenient dodge, but a dodge, nonetheless. Conservatives have actually espoused tax cuts in the face of mounting debt, and have done so mouthing conservative dogma. It is easy to say that Republicans are no longer conservative, but I would love to see when conservative stopped voting for them.
And in addition, the era of Obama is more fiscally responsible. Obama has actually decided to not cut taxes for the very rich, and as the Washington Times even acknowledged, has cut more spending programs than Bush. But it is easier to see him as a profligate spender. Fine.
Bush and the Republicans almost destroyed this country with their hateful, discriminatory, and dishonest agenda. Now they're trying to blame all the problems that they created on Obama and the Democrats. I sure hope that the average American can see through their lies.
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