The Dems (Surprise!) Sit Up and Beg

5/23/07

The Democrats have abandoned their former insistence on a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and have given the President a more or less free hand in Iraq. In response for this lapdog trick, the Democrats have been allowed to spend about $17 billion more than Mr. Bush requested, only about $9 billion of which can be in any way identified with defense or veterans’ issues. The Democrats also got an increase in the minimum wage in exchange for their obeisance.

So the Democrats were given control of Congress in 2006 in order to get us out of Iraq. Once comfortably ensconced in their accustomed positions of power, they promptly abandoned the major issue on which they had conned the American people and returned to doing what they do best—spending other people’s money on programs favored by their constituencies, which, in Washington, is any political hermaphrodite capable of writing a check.

This argument by no means exonerates the Republicans. The GOP is generally put in office to be parsimonious with the public purse and to, until this bunch occupied the White House, pursue a sober foreign policy. Instead, the Republicans have turned a Democratic (!) surplus into a deficit and have put our kids in the middle of an interminable civil war, seemingly to enrich the GOP’s puppet masters in the defense and oil industries.

What is abundantly clear is that both parties pursue a pro-growth agenda: a pro government growth agenda. Yet the typical voter, who gets little from the federal government but the bill, continues to vote for one of the parties merely because the prospect of voting for the other is too frightening to contemplate.

What is the voter who is fed up with picking up the tab for the callow preening of the popinjays and poltroons who have been ceded control of our political system to do? Ron Paul, who has throughout his career displayed sympathy for the small government point of view, is the longest of shots for the Republican nomination, largely because he actually believes in for what the Republicans is mere banausic propaganda and because he talks sense about Iraq specifically and about America’s role in the world generally. Right now, the latter is about as welcome in the GOP as is a temperance crusader at a frat party. The party of which Dr. Paul used to be standard-bearer, the Libertarians, is clearly a flawed vehicle, but, for now, is about all we have. GOPers love to castigate those who vote Libertarian for chimerically “throwing away their votes.” However, one cannot help but think that those who voted for the nascent Republican Party in the 1850s were subject to the same excerebrose abuse.

This writer doesn’t know what the answer is, but I am quite certain that voting for either of the major parties will only keep us on the path to supergovernment. The major parties present us only with alternative directions for ever accelerating growth of government.

The Pontificator