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my new favorite columnist – Bob Herbert…

Posted on Saturday 2 May 2009


Out of Touch
By BOB HERBERT
May 1, 2009

The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.

The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan…

It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about. Americans are aghast at what happened to the country while the G.O.P. was in charge. Iraq and Katrina come to mind, not to mention the transmutation of the Clinton surpluses into the Bush budget deficits and the collapse of the entire economy…

And yet the G.O.P. behaves as though nothing has changed. Even in the face of a national economic nightmare, the party is offering nothing in the way of policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies. It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about…

All the talk about the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party is silly. It will be back. Someday. But first it will have to stop fooling itself and re-engage with the real world.
So appreciated, the truth. And so well said. I had trouble picking out the nuggets because every sentence was a nugget. His op-ed won’t change the way things are playing out, but my it was a refreshing read. All this howling about Socialism, and big spending, and overtaxing, is not even something to refute. In my book, the most absurd piece of it is taxes. They talk about it like it’s a moral issue instead of a simple input output issue. If you spend a whole lot, you have to take in a whole lot. If you don’t, you get something like this:
The humps aren’t hard to follow. The Republicans have talked about taxes as if it’s a philosophy, not something as simple as balancing a checkbook. Herbert’s exactly right – "a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric." But it’s his next line is the classic – "Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about…"

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