I used to be a Republican. I know, these days that admission may get me in trouble with one camp on the count of ‘backsliding’ and with another camp for the simple fact that I voted for Bush. (To clarify, I only did so the first time around) Believe me, very few feel more guilty about the latter than I do, and fortunately for my current sanity, the state I lived in at the time always votes blue, so I did not actually help GWB get any electoral votes. But still. It hurts.
One principle that I always appreciated about the R’s was the idea of small government. It sounds so clean, simple, and efficient. Also, the talk about ‘personal responsibility’ was something that sounded, well, good. But, as I’ve learned over the years, talk is incredibly cheap in the realm of politics, and these two simple tenets are violated in practice all the time by the same people who so vociferously speak positively about them. What set off this post was reading this article, which can be summarized as follows:
1) Republicans believe in small government only for programs that they do not wish to support. Authorizing huge medicare expenditures (the profits of which will return to the private sector, mostly to the pharmaceutical industry), and the most obvious example, the billions continually spent on defense in general and Iraq in particular, give the lie to their small government talk.
2) Republicans do not want people to trust government when it comes to administering welfare, education, or other programs. On the other hand they do want us to put our trust in government when it comes to matters of national security, especially in regard to surveillance and the management and operation of our military.
So what gives? To me, this is just pure and simple corruption.