A modern ‘big lie’

This article in Sunday’s Washington Post is really insulting. It begins thus:

Demoralized Republicans adjourned the 109th Congress at 5 a.m. yesterday with a near-empty Capitol, closing the door on a dozen years of nearly unbroken GOP control by spending more time in the final days lamenting their failures -- to rein in government, tame the deficit and temper their own lust for power -- than reliving their successes.

These so-called failures can only be called failures if in fact the GOP was trying to accomplish a goal. Many of the things in this article were never goals of the GOP.

They never wanted to reduce the size of government. The GOP has controlled every branch of our government for the last six years, and they have overseen the largest increase in government bureaucracy since World War II. They don’t want to reduce the size of government, they just wanted to change what it does, and they did that.

It is the same way with government spending. They didn’t want to reduce spending; they wanted to vastly increase it, which they did. They just changed what government was spending money on and where tax revenues were coming from.

And as for tempering their “lust for power” To this class of Republicans, power was and still is an end in itself. There was never any desire to reduce it, so there was no failure. The only failure was in maintaining it permanently as they had envisioned.

And there is no mention of the big Republican triumphs, like bankruptcy reform -- a credit card industry giveaway, and the oil industry giveaways. Really there were too many corporate welfare giveaways to list them all.

But it isn’t all bad:

“You know, the American people took the reins of government away from the Republican Party . . . in this last election. They did so, I think, in large part because they were tired of our hypocrisy,” fumed Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) from the Senate floor.

To me, the hypocrisy is the important point. And here’s another memorable anecdote from Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.):

Wamp had his specific moment, June 27, 2003, when emissaries from the GOP leadership woke him in the middle of the night, pleading with him to change his vote against the Medicare prescription drug bill, the largest entitlement expansion since the creation of Medicare. House leaders kept the vote open more than an hour, setting a record as they twisted arms, threatened and even told one member that political support for his son was at stake.

“It looked like we were in the back pockets of the prescription drug companies, and some of us were,” Wamp said, concluding that Republican leaders had forgotten about conservative principals and cared only for the preservation of power.

But again, he’s lying about what the real “conservative principles” are in order to maintain the paradigm.

The author states that the Republican Congress “expanded the powers of the government to combat terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks” but these powers, like the domestic, warrantless wiretapping and suspension of habeas corpus, are aimed at law-abiding US citizens, not the terrorists in Afghanistan.

It takes reading halfway through the propaganda to finally come to this:

Democrats were harsher -- but only by degrees. Former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) pointed with disdain to former president Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Iraq war, the yawning federal debt, “a complete breakdown on oversight as well as civility,” corruption and a “willingness to cede most of their authority as an equal branch of government” to the Bush administration.

“One would have to search long and hard through history to find a dozen years more disastrous than that,” Daschle said.

And the biggest achievements the author points to, like turning around the Reagan deficits and beginning to reduce the debt, were accomplished under President Clinton, and then reversed under Bush to create the massive debt our children and their children will be paying off for years to come. Could the GOP really have done anything decent on its own?

But even in dealing a blow to the current class of Republicans, the article seeks to maintain the paradigm of what the “real” conservative agenda is; and it’s a lie.