|
The Republican Party of Whiners
by Chris Edelson It’s old news by now that the Republican party doesn’t really live up to many of the principles it has supposedly stood for over the past 30 years. The party of fiscal responsibility magically turned surplus to deficit and never actually balanced a federal budget when it controlled the White House. The party of free market capitalism was always ready to bail out corporate America when needed. No one should be able to say any longer, with a straight face, that Republicans stand for fiscal restraint or laissez-faire capitalism. Another empty idea that should be relegated to the dust bin of history is the laughable slogan that Republicans are the party of personal responsibility. True personal responsibility means owning up to one’s mistakes. Republicans keep showing us that they are best at passing the buck and complaining that they have been unfairly blamed for one screw-up or another. The Wall Street Journal offers the latest example of the culture of complaint–an opinion piece ludicrously charging that “The treatment of Bush has been a disgrace“. You might have thought that Bush’s approval ratings have been mired below 30% for good reason, or reasons: the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war, and the economic meltdown. This is an administration that is always asleep at the switch, you might think. Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is here to set us straight. The real problem, according to Shapiro, is “the treatment President Bush has received from this country.” You see, poor President Bush has always been a humble man, aimed at uniting Americans. He has paid “a price for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans.” Bush’s “bipartisan efforts” were rejected by both parties. I can only hope that Mr. Shapiro is positioning himself as a latter-day George Orwell, using black-is-white, up-is-down rhetoric in some attempt to amuse or enlighten us. Bush is not a president who united Americans. His approach has been “my way or the highway”. Perhaps Mr. Shapiro has been out of the country, or the solar system, for the past 8 years, but the rest of us know Bush as the president who, upon winning re-election in 2004 declared “I have earned political capital, and I intend to spend it” by pushing a radical plan to privatize Social Security. Bush’s approach was anything but bipartisan–though he did succeed in uniting Democrats and Republicans in opposition. This is a president who won razor-thin margins of victory but governed as if he had won a 2-1 margin in the electoral college. When it came to Supreme Court nominees, Bush chose extremists (especially Alito) who alienated moderates, even in his own party. When it came to Iraq, you were either with him or with the terrorists. Right down the line, from the environment to family planning to the economy to church-state issues, Bush took hard-line, radical positions and surrounded himself with hard-line radicals like John Bolton, Dick Cheney, David Addington, and others. Mr. Shapiro is missing the obvious explanation for President Bush’s consistently miserable (dis)approval ratings: Bush is a failed president, and everyone knows it. President Bush likes to talk about personal responsibility. Perhaps one day, that principle will even apply to Bush himself. Hat tip to Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, who wrote about the WSJ piece earlier. Chris Edelson is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who writes frequently about current political and legal issues. His writing has previously been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Metroland (Albany, NY) and at commondreams.org.
|
This_Category |
|
Category:: Political Views |
Recommend this article...
 Quote this article on your site | Views: 665
Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4
Tags: Chris Edelson Wall Street Journal Republican Party Whiners
|
Commentary 
