The record is pretty clear. With 60 votes in the senate (until recently) and a majority in the house, what has the party in power accomplished? For about 500 days, nothing. And what are their priorities? Extended unemployment insurance because their agenda was to spend ridiculous amounts of money on anything but things that help the people on "main street." Given a choice of wasteful spending and machine party politics vs. doing nothing and going into debt far less, I choose the latter. If I were running campaigns for republicans, I'd have a big poster on the wall, "It's the economy stupid."
It looks like this fix bill is going back to the House. I'm glad they have to vote on it again. One more nail in their electoral coffin. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...3031215961678.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
On which votes did the Democrats line up unanimously to vote against Bush? To the contrary, if many of them ever opposed him, he called them out for being unpatriotic and anti-American. They didn't have the adolescent peer pressure emanating from their leadership to vote unanimously on anything, the way Republicans do, which makes Republicans appear so conformist and juvenile when they have not one exception in their voting bloc. The giant Clinton surpluses were enabled by a vote early in his administration to raise taxes on the rich back to the traditional, pre-Reagan level. Every single Republican voted against it, so Republican revisionists had to later claim that the surpluses were an accident of history, a bubble. When American health stats soon rise above the 47th best in the world, some Republican myth will have to be invented to explain it.
Read your history. The dems, knowing they would lose again after the Gulf War was so smoothly run by Bush make an open tactic to block everything he wanted to do in his final two years in office. Their obstructionism worked flawlessly. Now the GOP is doing pretty much the same thing. What goes around comes around. I mean, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the dems are not perfect angelic people. Personally, both sides are flat out wrong to do this. It's bad politics and hurts the country.
I don't need to read history, I lived it. Democrats didn't vote unanimously like Republicans do. Many always cross over, because their party grants them individual freedom. The Republican leadership exerts great conformist pressure on their own. As for Big Bush's efficient success in the first Iraq War, nope, Republicans were very disappointed that he didn't carry the war past Kuwait to Baghdad. The Warmonger Wing considered the war a failure. This feeling depressed the family, producing a son determined to start another war there. One week into Little Bush's presidency, he had some jets shoot at targets in Iraq for no reason, angering Saddam, just to send a message to him that war would be on its way a couple of years later.
As long as obstructionism is based in principle, I have no problem with it from either side. When it's based on politics, then I think it's silly.
It's always based in politics, when both parties do it. You may be for small government, but neither of the two major parties are. Both parties have identical views of government: limited government when the other party is in power, big government when they, themselves, are in power. Neither side currently believes in limited government as a principle. Both want to use government for their agenda and decry government when used for another agenda.
I disagree. Dennis Kucinich has a deep and honest opposition to war. Ron Paul has a deep and honest opposition to expansionist government. When you see Betsy Markey change her vote from "no" to "yes" on health care because it's more important that the President has a victory than her opposing parts of the legislation, then that's political. Well, no kidding. But it's not a binomial relationship. Not every Democrat will vote to increase the size of government nor will every Republican vote to shrink it. It's a matter of degrees, and the Republicans are by and large in favor of a more limited government than are the Democrats. I'm sorry, but when you're creating so much new government that you can't even secure Olympia Snowe's vote, then that's one radical-ass bill. I'll state again that the votes for health care legislation was no bi-partisan; only the opposition to it was.
I don't agree with that at all. Pretty much each administration/majority has been competing with the previous one for who can grow the budget more. There are exceptions (and of course debates over who was responsible for that exception), but it's certainly not as if the budget expands under Democrats and contracts, or even grows at a slower rate, under Republicans as a rule. How the budget grows seems pretty much unconnected with party. I was going to say that Republicans talk a better small-government game, but then I remembered Democratic congresspeople constantly bemoaning the alarming expansion of government under W. Bush.
I was outraged by the growth of government by GWB, but to pretend that President Obama spends just the same is to ignore reality. He's quadrupled the highest deficit GWB ever posted and equaled the debt GWB added in eight years in just 14 mos.
You keep saying "To say/pretend X" about my comments when I clearly say the opposite. "Pretty much each administration/majority has been competing with the previous one for who can grow the budget more." Neat stat. I remember similar stats used about deficit growth under Reagan.
I think we can call President Obama the big winner. Unfortunately, we're all the losers. And I disagreed with those policies as well.
To this point. The "winner" has been changing quite a bit. Are you certain that a future "big spending winner" won't be a Republican? I'm not. I wasn't calling you inconsistent. I said that in relation to my original point that big spending is pretty integral to both parties. Unless they are in the minority, in which case they suddenly become small-government advocates.
President Obama is the Michael Jordan of Government spending. His performance is not likely to ever be surpassed.
