Posted by PWalker
I just started reading Pat Buchanan’s new book, Where the Right Went Wrong. His basic point is that Republicans have abandoned conservative priniciples and become a big-government party.
Historically, Republicans have been the party of the conservative virtues – of balanced budgets, of a healthy skepticism toward foreign wars, of a commitment to traditional values and fierce resistance to the growth of government power and world empire. No more. To win and hold high office, many have sold their souls to the very devil they were baptized to do battle with.
For evidence to back up Buchanan’s premise, you need not look any further than the recent Republican rule-change in the House allowing Tom Delay to continue to serve as Majority Leader even if he is indicted. The new principle is power. The old rules are now inoperative.
Similarly, Bob Novak wrote a recent article that shows another clear example:
[I]n Germany last week, the Federal Reserve chairman sounded like a Democrat on the U.S. Senate floor inveighing against Bush administration deficits.
Greenspan’s speech last Friday at the European Banking Congress in Frankfurt could just as easily have been written for Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the deficit-obsessed Democrat. Free-market conservative Greenspan warned that the U.S. current accounts deficit (largely the trade deficit) is unsupportable and that sooner or later foreign investors will either stop buying American assets or ask for a higher return. That outcome, he warned, pointed to a further decline in the dollar against the euro, to the dismay of Europeans.
What happened to the conservative principle of balanced budgets? Remember when Republicans wanted to ammend the constitution to insist on balanced budgets? That was then; now if you worry about balanced budgets, you are “deficit-obsessed.”
One core principle on which the Republican party has never wavered is the second amendment. Even in the wake of Sept. 11th…
At a December 2001 hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft declared that FBI checks of gun records into foreigners being detained on suspicion of possible connections to the September 11 hijackers would “violate their privacy.”
Well, at least they didn’t do anything dangerous, like buy a book. Ashcroft had no issue with searching library records. I guess the new slogan could be “guns don’t kill people, ideas do.”