A letter writer in today's San Antonio Express-News makes a good point, though I am sure she didn't mean to or for it to be pointed out as such by those of us on the right:
All the years President Bush was in office and he and the Republicans passed bills that spent more money than any administration has in the history of the United States, no one called them socialists.I'm guessing one didn't hear them called socialists, yes, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have any socialist tendencies or should have not been called out for them. And there were those on the right who recognized George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" for the mistake that it was, among them none other than Dick Armey, one of the architects of the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and the Contract With America:
Too often the policy agenda was determined by short-sighted political considerations and an abiding fear that the public simply would not understand limited government and expanded individual freedoms. How else do we explain "compassionate conservatism," No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug benefit and the most dramatic growth in federal spending since LBJ's Great Society?So there's that. There are those who might call a large percentage of Republicans in congress socialists or at least point out how they're not giving real conservatives a reason to vote for them, but the fact is they're not being listened to as much as they should. Back to the letter-writer who prompted this morning's entry, she goes on to say, 'No one will take their riches with them or send it ahead when we die," and she uses that seemingly as a justification for Democrats to take the money from the rich and use it to finance more vote-buying schemes. One wonders what other pithy sayings she'd come up to justify more nanny-state reindeer games.
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