Over at the Heritage Foundation's website, Brian Riedl takes apart a tiresome argument that because the Republicans were fiscally irresponsible it is okay for the Democrats to be fiscally irresponsible too:
The logic seems to be that if a Republican President can run up $3.35 trillion in debt, then Obama should be given free rein to run up even greater debt. This is absurd. First, Obama pledged to fix what he considers Republican governing errors – not double down on them. Second, the permanent $1 trillion budget deficits America is currently facing call for a tougher approach than the $150 billion to $450 billion deficits that typified the last eight years. Finally, many Republicans blame themselves for supporting too much deficit spending under Bush, and now believe that spending should be restrained to fix those deficits. Should they be criticized for coming around to this position? Would the President prefer that Republicans continue to argue that deficits never matter?
President Obama is set to more than double President Bush's deficits.
ruth| 2.11.09 @ 5:02PM
Oh, hell no! I am not going to take responsibility for this stinking monstrosity of a spending bill. Liberals have been pushing outrageous, irresponsible monetary policies for decades. They own this debacle.
ruth| 2.11.09 @ 5:05PM
We stand by and watch this friggin' democrat/socialist coup d'etat.
Paul E. More| 2.11.09 @ 5:19PM
This is the same kind of argument (that Bush did things wrong so now Obama is allowed too as well) that Team Obama and its media shills (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, etc) used throughout the campaign. The Team Obama/media shills argument would be that well, “you did it too, so now its our turn” to do whatever it is that is wrong.
I think at bottom this form of argument is based on a much more radical worldview than most people realize. To put it bluntly, this is the kind of thinking that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright would use to in effect argue that two wrongs make a right and it may have at bottom a justification that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright would be very familiar with as well.
sre| 2.11.09 @ 5:20PM
I thought people voted for change.
J David| 2.11.09 @ 6:16PM
Some of us have been screaming about the RINOs since El Presidente Jorge Boosh started spending our dinero like a hopped-up whore. Conservatives have NEVER been in favor of tax extortion to pay for big gov't enslavement. All who blame conservatives are just bald-faced lying scum.
Paul E. More| 2.11.09 @ 7:56PM
Let us keep in mind that many of the people, politicians and leaders President Obama has entrusted with solving the problems he blames solely on Bush and Republicans were endorsed and voted for by the policies that Bush followed that Obama finds fault with.
Chuck Schumer voted for the Iraq war and virtually picked our last attorney general. Senator Kerry, then Senators Clinton and Biden also voted for the Iraq war. And the Iraq war alone added $600 billion to our debt just since 2003 which would be about an extra $100 billion per year. I’m sure Schumer, Clinton, Biden and Kerry also voted for the budgets that were unbalanced over the Bush years as well.
And then let us not forget the policies that caused this mess that Obama himself has supported and continues to support, namely forcing banks through federal government regulation to loan money to poor people who can’t afford to pay the loans back. This policy of loaning money out to burden folks (in this case at the insistence of poverty pimps) is similar in some ways to the foreign debt crisis that we saw in the 1980s when major US banks lent money to South American and Eastern bloc countries that couldn’t afford to pay it back. At least the foreign debt crisis wasn’t caused by government mandates, but it didn’t help the “poor” countries pushed into bankruptcy in any event, just as the poverty pimps aren’t helping poor people by destroying the solvency of US banks by forcing banks to make loans that shouldn’t be made.
SoundOfMind| 2.12.09 @ 10:39AM
First, understand that I have made the swing from centrist to conservative/libertarian in the course of the Bush 43 term.
I never, from the first rumors about Iraq until today, thought there was sufficient evidence to consider the Iraq war. Even if we "won", I don't believe that we as a third party, as different from the Iraqis as we are, would unite tribes that have hated each other for centuries to form a government shaped as we would hope. Even if the Iraqis come close, I don't expect it to last very long.
Please tell me about all the Republican congressional fiscal responsibility demonstrated in Bush 43's term. Couldn't they have done something to really change CRA, Freddie and Fannie? Didn't anyone realize the recklessness of the banking system? Why did Greenspan have the interest rates so low? How many times did Bush veto ridiculous spending? How many times were his decisions comprimised by the need to fund "his" war?
Of course Dems voted for the war, but the memory of the average citizen is short, shallow and flawed - aided by the media's shaping of their views. Any thing good that happened was ignored. Any bad was blamed only on Bush and he owned it.
Bush got involved in absurdities like Terri Schiavo. And we had "compassionate conservatism", AKA liberal light. From my perspective, it was a miserable eight years. It was a field day for the media (with a daily sound bite of Bush sounding like a baboon for Letterman). And then, Republicans ran McCain...
How easy does it have to be for the left? They got their socialist elected. All Bama has to say is that it was Bush's fault and it sticks like super glue. The libs can do anything they want and it will be justified because there is so little high moral ground to point to during Bush's term. All the sudden, the Republicans are responsible? Well actually, except for the contemptible three, they now are, but since they have such a poor history, it's easy for Bama to say they are just being partisan.
The bottom line is, if the Republicans weren't so bad, the libs wouldn't have it so good.
ruth| 2.12.09 @ 5:02PM
Liberals' blame game won't work forever, eventually they will own the debacle they are creating.
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