JBD

My cousin Mike Mc and I traded friendly political barbs with each other at our Irish family party. The one that hit me hardest was his simple question “What happened to the surplus?”

By this he means the 2000 FY budget surplus. Through the hard work of the Republican congress, led by Newt Gingrich and the 1994 “Contract with America” class, coupled with the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War, and the biggest years of the hi-tech bubble, the Federal Government actually spent less money than they took in for one fiscal year. By the time Clinton left office, however, the numbers were negative again, and have stayed negative ever since.

This chart tells the sad story.

My answer? RINOs – Republicans In Name Only.

I consider the typical Democrat to be mostly harmless, a usually sincere do-gooder who buys into a fairy-tale idea of society and human nature.  They are usually their own worst enemies during an election, spouting off about “hope” and “change” and “reform” (or for the Che lovers out there, revolucion!). But their history of corruption, spending and kowtowing to Europe usually keeps them from getting too powerful for too long. They are easily tolerated and mostly manageable in our prosperous free society, child-like and naïve, but not to be trusted with the car keys.

But RINOs are my mortal enemies. RINOs are thick on the ground in Washington and in state capitols, vastly outnumbering their practically extinct counterparts, the DINOs, also known variously as Scoop Jackson Democrats, or Southern Democrats, or Law & Order Democrats, or National Security Democrats. All these are dated terms, because the Reagan–Bush realignment of the 80’s and 90’s caused a huge number of nominal Democrats to switch parties so they could be on the winning side. The rest of the Democrat mugwumps woke up and moved right after September 11, 2001.

RINOs serve and enable the purposes of the core of the Democrat party machine, embodied by the Clintons and their cabal – Blumenthal, Begala, Rahm Emmanuel, etc. - the elitist (but not actually elite) bitter, disaffected, non-productive segment of our society. They range from the sign carrying, slogan chanting, drum pounding hippie types and Code Pinkers to the career Ivy League lawyers and J-school agitators who won’t or can’t get a real job or start a productive company, but expect the productive and hard-working among us to quietly turn over an ever-growing portion of our earnings to them for their quasi-charitable and socialist power-building governmental programs.

I believe that the ridiculous increases in discretionary non-military spending that Bush and the RINOs allowed – and in most cases, added to – from 2001 to 2006 earned them the defeat they got in the 2006 elections. When are they going to learn that they can’t win votes by trying to outspend  Democrats? The Dems take the money and the credit, then keep right on trashing the Republicans as if they were slapping widows and starving orphans. Democrats believe you can never spend too much money - there is always another program or constituency that needs government money.

That’s why I would very much prefer not to have McCain as my candidate. He’s a 30-year veteran of the log rolling and pork barreling that has caused out debt. Though he has had some good votes – for tax cuts, the Surge, the War on Terror in general, he’s also gone wrong on campaign finance and immigration. He’s the lesser of two evils, and I'm still not sure I'll vote for him.

But except for the paint job, there is not a dime's bit of difference between his opponent Obama and any other recent Democrat presidential candidate  - either of the Clintons, or Kerry, Gore, Edwards, Mondale, Dukakis, Carter, McGovern, you name them - and none of them are anywhere near the right kind of people we need to lead this country, regardless of the worshipful and fawning media treatment they get.

Cousin Mike nails it with this comment:

Posted by: JBD at 11:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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