Conservative attack on government

Here’s a link to an article I liked on The American Prospect online. It’s a good summary on the state of our government now, after six years of our government under GOP control. The Democrats have their work cut out for them.

It is crucial to understand that it’s not merely Republicans’ incompetence or political pandering that has left the government in shambles. Rather, many of their acts of sabotage were premeditated, often hatched in right-wing think tanks. The central if unstated mission of those idea factories, and their leading funders, is to weaken the public sector in order to minimize its capacity to tax and regulate the private sector. But because the general public doesn't actually share conservatism's deep hostility toward government, their most effective tactics rely on subterfuge and operate in ways that can't be easily detected.

. . .

In the case of the tax cuts, the same bogus justifications that failed to come to pass during the Reagan era -- supply-side shibboleths, purported financial benefits for average Americans, a supposed streamlined budget -- were trotted out again to provide cover for the right's actual agenda: paying off wealthy contributors while burying the war-preoccupied government under heaps of debt.

This is the bigger picture of why the American public voted the GOP out of office last November. They are tired of government incompetence like FEMA’s inability to respond to Katrina, Congress’ rubberstamping torture, and being manipulated into a pointless war turned into a fiasco through incompetence.