First, let's talk about the fellow in the picture there, George W. Bush. Republicans pretend now that they never heard of him, but make no mistake: When he was President, Republicans loved that guy. You could not ask for a more hardline conservative President. He had Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and despite winning the Presidency with fewer votes than Al Gore and narrowly beating John Kerry, he governed as if there was only one party and he had a mandate to implement a conservative agenda. He passed big tax cuts. He increased military and domestic security spending. He pushed conservative social values like abstinence-only sex education and anti-gay bigotry. He treated foreign nations with contempt, pushed his wars through, did not care about international law. He was extremely partisan, leaving Democrats out of the governing process and pushing voter fraud falsehoods to try to deny Democrats the vote. He stocked the federal courts at all levels with conservative judges and put in place an ultra-conservative Supreme Court.
He was, in short, everything conservatives ever could have wanted, everything they ever dreamed about. And the result was an unmitigated disaster.
Bush inherited a balanced budget, but by the time he was done, he had run up unprecedented deficits and left President Obama facing an even larger deficit. The economy was in free fall, the worst most of us have ever seen it. The United States was hated and feared throughout the world. Two of the big three automobile companies were on the verge of collapse. We were still fighting two endless wars, one of which was based on lies about WMDs that we supposedly "knew" were there. The government was forced to offer up $750 billion to prop up banks just to keep the world economy from collapsing. We were losing over 500,000 jobs a month. And let's not forget, the country was attacked on his watch, the worst terrorist attack in our history by far, and the Bush administration was forewarned that something was coming but failed to react.
What I don't understand is, when you get exactly the governing principles that you want, when your party is free to implement everything they ever wanted, and they aggressively do so, and then it's plain to see that the result is an embarrassment and complete failure, how can you continue to support them? Honestly, I don't see it. Republican policies = disaster, this is clear and proven by experience. And yet conservatives have reacted by angrily trying to ensure that the next President doesn't implement something different. Sorry, but that's irrational. It's nuts.
OK, second, and this one is no better. As mentioned above, George W. Bush came into office with a balanced budget. One of the first major initiatives under his administration was a huge tax cut that went disproportionately to the very rich. Then 9/11 happened and we started two wars, and Bush and Republicans decided that no one had to pay for those wars, at least not until the next guy became president, so they actually lowered taxes some more. In his second term, he pushed through Medicare Part D without identifying any revenue to fund it.
As a result of these policies, the Bush administration ran up deficits larger than any that came before him. Add in the terrible economy at the end of Bush's second term, and President Obama inherited a worse deficit than any other President has ever had to deal with.
Now, never mind for the moment that Republicans, after running up huge deficits under Bush while never lifting a finger to bring them under control and seeming not to care at all, suddenly got religion on the day that President Obama took office and realized with apparent shock that we were running huge deficits and that this was going to destroy the country. Well, maybe not exactly "never mind," but their hypocrisy and dishonesty is obvious to every American with a brain, which means maybe 40% of us or so. The point I want to make is slightly different from that.
Now that they magically realize that the deficit has to be tamed, Republicans have a solution, which is to take money away from the poorest Americans (i.e.. food stamps and unemployment) or from people who have paid into the system for 40 or 50 years, paying for previous generations with a promise that one day they would benefit (i.e. Medicare and Social Security.) They tell us that this is the only way; we have no choice, because those programs are bankrupting the country.
Well maybe I'm a simpleton, but it seems to me that before you start attacking the safety net, the rational move would be to undo the things that got us into the deficit situation in the first place. Before you do anything else, restore the tax rates to Clinton administration levels, and restore military spending to Clinton levels as well. And then you might consider finding a way to raise revenues to pay for Medicare Part D. People seem to like it; we should be willing to pay for it. Also, ten years too late, let's raise taxes to pay for the two Bush wars. Again, if we wanted them so badly that we elected (and re-elected) the people who started them, we should be willing to make a small sacrifice and pay for them rather than pass the cost on to another generation.
Instead, we get the people who made utter fiscal irresponsibility a hallmark of their party telling us that we have to make the tough choices and screw over the poor and the elderly. I don't understand how anyone can say that and mean it, but they do. And I don't understand why anyone believes them. Again, just nuts.
I have lots of problems with conservatives, but these two really, really big items stand out to me. To be a Republican, you pretty much have to rationalize away the whole Bush administration as well as the steps your party took to create the deficit spending we have today. That's a lot of rationalizing.
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