{"id":11562,"date":"2007-07-23T15:10:56","date_gmt":"2007-07-23T19:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11562.html"},"modified":"2007-07-23T15:10:56","modified_gmt":"2007-07-23T19:10:56","slug":"its-not-government-its-conservative-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/its-not-government-its-conservative-government\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s not government; it’s conservative government"},"content":{"rendered":"

I remember hearing this argument<\/a> a bit in 2005, but it may be poised for a comeback.<\/p>\n

“Barack Obama said we’re going to have to have the government take over health care. He at least had the integrity to say he wants to raise your taxes,” Romney said. “The right answer is not a government takeover, it’s not socialized medicine. It’s not Hillarycare.”<\/p>\n

At a town hall meeting in Exeter later Sunday, he said, “I don’t want the guys who ran the (Hurricane) Katrina cleanup running my health care system.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even if we put aside the unusually stupid assessment of Obama’s healthcare plan — which isn’t even close to a “government take over” — Romney’s punch-line was a fairly common talking point on the right in the wake of the Katrina fiasco: this proves government is not to be trusted.<\/p>\n

On a related note, a GAO study apparently found that over the course of seven years, including all of Bush’s first term, the Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion to the estates of deceased farmers<\/a>. What’s more, the agency had regulations in place to ensure the payments were properly made, but they were ignored.<\/p>\n

It prompted at least one<\/a> far-right blogger to use a Romney-like line: “And this is the government Hillary! wants to run the US health care system.”<\/p>\n

This is wholly unpersuasive.
\n
\nI’d hoped this would be obvious by now, but the problem with a breakdown like Katrina is not with government; it’s with incompetent<\/i> government. P. J. O’Rourke once joked, “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work — and then they get elected and prove it.”<\/p>\n

The point isn’t that FEMA, for example, is incapable of responding to a natural disaster. Bush helped turn the agency into a joke, but FEMA used to be extremely well run and fully capable of helping areas in need of assistance. To hear Romney tell it, government can’t respond to a hurricane, so it certainly can’t bring access to quality healthcare to Americans.<\/p>\n

In reality, it can do both. The former governor may not realize it, but he’s actually attacking Bush far more than the dreaded Big Government — the federal system used to respond to hurricanes just fine.<\/p>\n

Indeed, I wonder how far Romney is prepared to take his little comparison. Does he want “the guys who ran the Katrina cleanup” running Medicare? Or would he support privatization? Does he want “the guys who ran the Katrina cleanup” running Social Security? Or should that be privatized, too?<\/p>\n

Maybe some enterprising political reporter might ask for a clarification.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember hearing this argument a bit in 2005, but it may be poised for a comeback. “Barack Obama said we’re going to have to have the government take over health care. He at least had the integrity to say he wants to raise your taxes,” Romney said. “The right answer is not a government […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}