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Glad Someone Finally Said It
Blastfax kudos to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for coming out and saying what everybody knows is true but nobody wants to admit.
We are living with exactly what Democrats want.
They want higher gas prices.
They want open borders.
They want massive spending.
They want to make people dependent on government.
Yes, this is what Democrats want. All of it. And they also want the Government to monitor your bank account, the Government to tax you for every mile you drive, the Government to indoctrinate your children that white people are responsible for every injustice in the world, and the Government to label you a domestic terrorist if you speak up against any of it. (OK, to be fair, an awful lot of Republicans want open borders and massive spending, too.) They would also be perfectly happy to keep Covid restrictions in place forever, and, to those who are complaining about the scarcity and high cost of consumer goods, the Democrats and the Washington Post, have a simple message: “Stop complaining and lower your expectations, you peasants.”
For the middle and working class, “Lower your expectations.” For the political elite, “Ready the private jet, I have a Climate Conference to attend.”
It’s very important in politics to define your opponent. Democrats have convinced large numbers of people that Republicans are gay-hating racists. (Remember “Mike Pence wants to force gay kids into electroshock therapy.” Or “Mitt Romney wants to put black people in chains.” Or, “Trump said our troops were a bunch of losers.”) Republicans have been very weak on this. They will try, mostly unsuccessfully, to define individual Democrat politicians. (“Bernie Sanders is a socialist.” “Kamala Harris can be difficult to warm up to.”) But they seem reluctant to define Democrats as a whole, probably because they think that would make it more difficult to cut deals with Democrats, should they ever win another majority.
That said, Ron Johnson is right, and more Republicans should be saying this.
Published in Politics
I beg to differ.
This is absolutely true and I have seen it with my own eyes. I live in a very liberal California town and have dear friends who are just as distressed about California’s increasingly expensive yet decaying quality of life as I am. They even acknowledge–in whispers–that bad Democrat policies make our quality of life worse. But when election time comes around–so help me–they would sooner have the flesh flayed from their bones than be caught voting for a conservative Republican who might turn things around.
This was in a recent memes post:
True. The intellectual gymnastics they’ll perform to justify continuing to vote Democrat are impressive. And they really don’t like having that pointed out.
The way I saw that among neighbors when I lived in Phoenix and some of my own relatives too, is like “Wow the Democrats have really messed things up! We have to elect more Democrats to fix it!”
What I heard back in the first years of Trump’s administration was not that his policies caused the prosperity, the increase in blue-collar wages, the increase in minority employment. No, it was that Trump was just a beneficiary of the “business cycle”. Damn it, you can’t fight that kind of stupidity. I would expect to hear –if I were listening — that Biden’s policies didn’t cause the coming depression, but rather that he is the victim of the business cycle.
I’m always baffled by those who are called out for a clearly inaccurate comment, yet choose to double down on it rather that just say “I exaggerated” or the like.
I would guess (note, guess) that the number of posts by Trump supporters here who favor smaller government are in the thousands. It would be easier to find some of my own comments criticizing him for signing a bloated budget, but I’m unwilling to waste even that amount of time to prove the obvious.
Actually what I described before, wasn’t all of it. The higher employment, lower gas prices, etc, during the Trump years, were actually “leftover Obama.” And I’m sure that now they’re saying all the current problems and the Afghanistan mess etc, are really “leftover Trump.”
Thankfully I can’t hear them from this distance.
I figure he probably meant Trump supporters in Congress etc, but that’s not what he wrote.
He STARTED his campaign pledging to not do anything about a program that is the very definition of wasteful Washington, the ethanol mandate. Then he quadrupled down on fiscal recklessness by not even considering entitlement reform. He took it completely off the table. His starting point left more than half of the budget untouched. On top of this he pledged a tax cut. You didn’t need to be Kreskin to know what would happen. For all this he was rewarded with the nomination.
Nobody on talk radio, nobody on Fox News spoke out against this. If a politician or a pundit raised an objection, they either fell back in line or they were excommunicated. And the Republican base swarmed to his rallies and rewarded them with their votes. I’m supposed to be impressed that somebody somewhere on the internet said something? Even with close to full employment we were running trillion dollar deficits!
And that’s how you get Biden.
The political tone deafness is off the charts.
In Trump’s. First budget, he wanted to cut younger people out of funding social security. It was rejected.
Just because he didn’t campaign on it, he saw a surer way of removing it than any Amal government mouthpiece that has ever run and lost.
If the largest generation since the boomers were not paying into social security, they would eventually vote against social security for the shrinking boomers.
But now THEY are just as invested in the social security sham as the Boomers and the Zoomers are a mid-generation like the Xers. They are too small compared to millenials to have a lot of political clout.
You are fully entitled to the above concerns. You are not entitled to claim something that is untrue and refuse to back off it. See my earlier posts.
I think we are seeing an interesting parallel here. A number of Trump supporters were worried by his spending. According to Spiff, they should have immediately become NeverTrump and railed against the guy, but they liked too much else that the
To democrats, all the failings of the dems pale in comparison to the GOP:
The GOP represent stupidity and racism and all the things you left behind to get where you are. The GOP want women shackled to a crib rather than in the workforce. The GOP is a dumb jock clinging to his guns and religion, or Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.
The way people describe the GOP, I would not be a part of it.
Hm. Those are the parts I liked.
Nobody considers entitlement reform. Because they want to stay in office.
Why is this hard to understand? Why was it on Trump to suddenly do something that no one else had done, ever – assuming he could get the votes to do it? As I understand things, Republicans also enjoy being in office.
Tax cuts grow the economy, which increases tax revenues. You could look it up.
Ryan pushed it but of course all the fake conservatives hate him. Dubya pushed it. He’s the last GOP presidential candidate to get over 50% of the vote. Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. I get why Trump was too afraid to address the problem. Trump’s supporters praise him for being some kind of great fighter. He didn’t fight the battles that mattered. He had petty feuds over press coverage. And now we are approaching $30 trillion in debt driven by entitlement spending.
Coolidge cut taxes too but he also cut spending. If you are not willing to do the second, you undermine the argument for the tax cut. Yes, tax cuts grow the economy but they don’t create a dollar’s growth in tax revenue for every dollar of taxes cut. And if instead of cutting spending you dramatically increase spending, you have a tsunami of red ink.
I didn’t say there was no criticism. There’s always criticism but he got little pushback from so-called conservatives. And if anyone did make a fiscal conservative critique of his spending, they were banished from the party, like Justin Amash.
Maybe they accepted his defense? Regarding Amash, good riddance.
You are proving my point. They accepted what they once would have opposed. Trump was routinely graded on a curve even when it meant ditching conservative priorities. A party that can’t handle pushback from real deal fiscal conservatives like Amash has given up on conservatism. And so what if Trump wanted more military spending? For him the defense budget was apparently nothing more than a jobs program. In Afghanistan his only goal was to surrender to the enemy. Since that was his plan, why did we need increased defense spending anyway?