This blog printed on 100% recycled electrons.
More props to Adam Feser, the half of Aberdeen's Red, Blue & Purple who actually reads things to back hup his blog posts. Mr. Feser points us toward "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," a remarkable Daily Beast essay by conservative Bruce Bartlett. Mr. Bartlett did little things like develop supply-side economics and work for Presidents Reagan and Bush pére (and farther back, Ron Paul!). He earned a spot in the GOP doghouse by calling President Bush fils a Nixonian "pretend conservative" and saying the Bush-Cheney White House displayed "an anti-intellectual distrust of facts and analysis."
Bartlett guarantees more time in that doghouse by skewering the GOP socialism-criers with these facts and analysis:
According to the CBO, federal taxes will amount to just 15.5 percent of GDP this year. That’s 2.2 percent of GDP less than last year, 3.3 percent less than in 2007, and 1.8 percent less than the lowest percentage recorded during the Reagan years. If conservatives really believe their own rhetoric, they should be congratulating Obama for being one of the greatest tax cutters in history [Bruce Bartlett, "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," The Daily Beast, 2009.08.12].
Bartlett also sees the clear hypocrisy of the GOP suddenly rediscovering budget discipline:
In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto [Bartlett, 2009.08.12].
Bartlett also makes a very clear case that both the current deficit and the recession are primarily George W. Bush's fault. Read especially Bartlett's discussion of the recession's origins and his comparison of the performance of the economy under Clinton and Bush.
So if you want to vent your rage in a futile display of patriotic fantasy, go yell at President Bush... and let President Obama keep cleaning up Bush's mess.
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Bonus link! Bartlett is also well-known (and reviled by Neil Boortz sheep) for linking the "Fair Tax" with Scientology.
