Today’s Wall Street Journal offers us an editorial by Tom Coburn on the direction of the Republican Party:
Unfortunately, too many in our party are not yet ready to return to the path of limited government. Instead, we are being told our message must be deficient because, after all, we should be winning in certain areas just by being Republicans. Yet being a Republican isn’t good enough anymore. Voters are tired of buying a GOP package and finding a big-government liberal agenda inside. What we need is not new advertising, but truth in advertising.
Unfortunately for Mr. Coburn, while his thoughts are sometimes on the right track, they don’t go anywhere near far enough.
Republicans can tear up the “emergency spending” credit card and refuse to accept any new spending whatsoever, including for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until Congress does its job of eliminating wasteful spending. The federal budget contains a vast unexplored area of offsets. My office alone has identified $300 billion in annual waste. Borrowing from the next generation when we haven’t done our job of oversight is unconscionable.
How about legislation making earmarks illegal? How about disbanding the DEA and the ATF and then looking at every other alphabet soup agency and making deep cuts? How about returning some of the unconstitutionally owned federal lands to the public? So John McCain is a humble man eh? Then why is he in politics? I would love to hear an honest answer to that question. We need less government, not more. The Republican party is utterly clueless when it understanding that government in this country is so large that it now creates more problems than it solves.
Until the idea of federal shrinkage is part of the basic agenda and platform of a major party, this country will continue a downhill slide in the areas of morality, personal responsibility, economics, education and quality of life. Many readers will try to argue that all these things or at least some of them are improving but I would beg to differ. I’m guessing kids growing up in the 50’s and 60’s had a lot more quality of life than the fat little shits I see waddling around now. Those blubbertubs are the creation of the federal behemoth that has been steering us since World War II began. They’ve been taught that they can have whatever they want, whenever they want and that someone else will pay for it. Thank you Republicans, for being a part of the problem.