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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Monday, May 19, 2003
Calpundit asks, "Is there anything — anything at all — that George Bush actually takes seriously? Or is everything in the world nothing more than an excuse to play partisan games?" There is one answer, and only one that I can come up with. Bush truly does believe in reducing, reducing, and reducing again taxes for his wealthy supporters.
The most recently passed cut is remarkably unpopular. Not just Democrats but conservatives and even intensely partisan Republicans, even the Wall Street Journal are openly contemptuous of the bill. More criticism comes from the slavishly pro-Bush NRO:
The Senate legislation will do little for the economy and is incompatible with the House bill. Rather than attempting to narrow differences with the House in the Senate, the White House insisted on making them as sharp as possible.... How did we get to this point? A lot of the problem dates back to the earliest days of the Bush administration, when a conscious decision was made to blur the administration’s economic philosophy. On different days, it used supply-side arguments for its economic program, on other days Keynesian ones. While all administrations use contradictory arguments for their policies at times, they usually know themselves which ones they really believe in.
The probable answer is that they don't believe in either of the arguments; they just believe in the policy and aren't prepared to make the honest argument that their economic priority is to help the very rich and the consequences for the average American are not important to them.
Bush's dedication here really is quite striking. He has the worst record on jobs of any President since Hoover; all of his supporters and opponents are agreed that this is the major threat he faces in 2004. And yet, he has never produced a stimulus program - he has simply adopted stimulus as his favored talking point for the pre-determined class warfare programs which even his supporters don't believe will produce any real stimulus. (This doesn't mean, of course, that his supporters take the logical next step and admit that he is lying about his programs and motives for supporting them.) |
