Originally posted by: quest55720
It was not so much Obama winning as it was the GOP losing. They abandoned their fiscal conservative principles and are now paying the price. The GOP spent like drunken sailors during the bush years and now have to pay the piper. When the GOP gets back to its small government, low spending and low taxes principles they will get back into power. The GOP needs a young fiscal conservative to lead the party back. The GOP has been the democratic party light the last 8 years fiscally.
I'm so tired of hearing about the 'fiscal(ly) conservative principles' the GOP keeps abandoning.
Ya, I guess the crack addicts only problem is that they keep abandoning their sobriety principles.
But we should keep putting them in charge of the crack warehouse, because they're 'for' sobriety, and they tell us you can't trust the cops.
One of the basic flaws in our political system is the corruption of the conflict between the interests of the few extremely wealthy and powerful, and the interests of the public, which leads to many politicians who are not quite committed enough to the public's interests, who want to get elected, to make 'compromises' that get larger and larger, who use the 'fiscally conservative' message more for its appeal to voters than for policy, but more importantly, these voters' inability to notice when the democrats are actually the better choice.
You can get a Republican to say they're disappointed in their party, but it's few Republicans who will actually pay any attention to when the democrats are better.
To be fari, that describes a lot of democrats as well, but the Democrats aren't the ones who have the record of the terrible policies the Republicans have. The Democrats are not the ones who have aligned policy with the few very wealthy and powerful nearly as much as the Republicans have - or more accurately, the few extremely wealthy and powerful have made a lot fewer inroads to dominating the Democratic Party than the Republican Party - whether directly, or through stealth, by spreading a phony ideology.
If you want to have any discussion of the Republicans as the party of fiscal conservatism, you have to go back to *at least* Eisenhower, who had a top tax rate of 90% and massive numbers of American workers in unions; before him were the great Republicans whose policies to let the market do what it liked led to the Great Depression, and did not solve any of the problems FDR did such as a 90% elder poverty rate, and excessive poverty.
It's the Democrats and not the Republicans who have balanced the budget the only two periods it's been balanced in the last 50+ years (Johnson and Clinton)...
Look, I'm going to interrupt my own list there to say, Republicans need to get a clue when they're being manipulated by propaganda of the right. Consider for a moment how the 'poster child' for their demonization of Democrats' big government policies is the John 'Great Society' (we could cite alaos FDR's New Deal, but those policies are now so popular, so modest in terms of the size of government today, the Republicans would do worse than with the Great Society, and I'm picking the Great Society). Can they consider that maybe, just maybe, the Kennedy/Johnson policies were successful - they did greatly reduce poverty in America, and the economy did fine with them, bogged down as it was by Viet Nam (not to mention the space program taking up to 5% of the federal budget) - and that the critics of Johnson had an agenda to oppose him *because his policies were not good for the extremely wealthy and powerful*, and that they just made up lies to attack him with that would sell better to the public than 'the richest people want the poor to remain poor for our interests'? That they they go oout and invent the myth of how terrible 'big government Johnson' was not because it's correct but because it's propaganda many people will believe? That the 'it hurts the poor' rhetoric has some truth to it but exggerates the point to oppose policies that do a lot more good than harm, not out of any concern for the poor but for their own pocketbooks?
Most 'conservatives' don't like poverty. They're open to arguments that the government policies are harmful, not helpful, but their interest includes preferring the poor to be better off. So if the agenda of the rich is to screw the poor for their own pocketbooks, that message won't sell to more than a few percent of voters; they need to convince another 50% not that they should help the rich hurt others, but of their propaganda to get the same result by using other, false, arguments that pretend to want to help the poor.
This propaganda is so effective, that then when the Republicans got power, largely from the anti-liberal propaganda, and then greatly increased government for its own benefits, steering large sums into the pockets of the few, the conservatives could not identify what was happening, and could only express 'disapppointment' that their party who was *such* a strong believer in 'fiscal conservatism' could fall victim to some mysterious 'Washington disease', but whatever wrongs their party did, they remained convinced Democrats are far worse and would not consider voting for them, because they're the 'big government' party - that's the power of the propaganda.
No wonder the wealthy class spends so many hundreds of millions every year on the propaganda machine - the think tanks and the media products which actualy become profitable after years of subsidy, as the propagandized audience grows in size and pays for the products - it's money very, very well spent - for them.
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