Bush II pretty much threw that philosophy down the shitter. Americans are hurting right now due to the Bush/Republican Recession, and they want government to play a limited role in America’s recovery.

What’s funny is that Republicans value loyalty above all else, and they knew this might happen. But they couldn’t bring themselves to criticize Chimpy and his policies. They only have themselves to blame.

Damn I’m enjoying this.

Scream it louder, wingnuts. Scream the word SOCIALIST over and over and over again, like a schizo on the street corner who thinks the FBI has implanted a chip into his brain to read his thoughts.

Palin Jindal 2012!

I graduated from high school during the early 90s, and I recently visited my old high school history teacher, who showed me a journal of essays about world issues that her students had written about. I mentioned that, for them, the things happening in the world when I grew up are as remote to them as the vietnam war was to me (ie, a distant memory mentioned by their parents). My teacher mentioned that current students have no memory of the cold war. In fact, when you think about it, current high school students were born after the Cold War was over. This sort of red-baiting no longer resonates with people. While on one hand, conservatives should be happy that the lack of a communist threat means they no longer have to hand out increasing benefits to workers to keep the public from generating communist sympathies, they should also be away that the lack of a communist rival means that the “threat” of socialism just isn’t really a “threat.” It’s hard to claim that better health coverage and 90s-era
marginal tax rates will lead us on a slippery slope to a system that no longer really exists. As worst it will be a slippery slope to… Denmark?

Honestly–it makes me smile every time they start screaming that Democrats and Obama are socialists. I get that feeling that most families get when crazy Uncle Frank strips down to his underwear at the family reunion and starts singing sea chanties.

You know it’s going to happen, you’ve seen and heard it all before, you don’t want to laugh too loud because you are a wee bit ashamed for him, but–hell, it’s damned funny.

While conservatives sometimes gripe about how the word “liberal” meant laissez-faire not leftist politics, the Democrats are in fact a classically liberal party in most respects – respecting the free market with remarkably modest interference. Only compared to the theocrats of the Republican party does the Democratic Party look “leftist.” Clinton and Carter both would have been a Tory pretty much anywhere else in the world.

There are socialists in this country. Maybe Dennis Kucinich might qualify. Bernie Sanders openly and without apology. Maybe the left-wing most 25% of the House Progressive Caucus. Not Donna Edwards (MD-4), who defeated a corporate tool but is still not a socialist. The proposed tax rates under Obama are positively Milton Friedman-esque compared to the actual higher taxes under Eisenhower and Nixon and Ford. Of course, stupid conservatives cannot read their own history, it seems.