Can’t sleep. And this is all that’s on. Wonder what old Barry would say about 20,000 more troops? What would he say about carrying a budget for War completely off the books? The phrases, Limited Government, Small Government have at times seemed to me like code for Monarchy. Yet what we have today can not be described as small, and the leadership, as Kingly as pose it’s tried to strike in the past, is about to feel the Constitutional power of Congress’s oversight of the purse strings.
I sometimes wonder how conflated, even in my own mind, the concept of smaller government is with efficient government. I also wonder what $378,000,000,000 would have done for us here at home, instead of bled out into the sand. Oh, hell, I’m going back to sleep. I’ll leave you with this:
…contrary to what the Republicans would like their opponents to think, the American public didn’t put the Democrats in power in order to restore fiscal restraint. As my erstwhile colleague Noam Scheiber explained in November, not only are there very few true libertarians out there, but, according to a 2005 Pew Research Center report, the vast majority of voters are at least somewhat sympathetic to government. If anything, the Republicans didn’t lose last year because they grew the size of the government; they lost because they didn’t grow it very effectively. Voters chose Democrats not to cut the deficit but to create new programs to address the needs of the middle and working classes.
7 Comments
Interesting take.
I thought most Americans voted to stop the madness in Iraq, not just to stop the insanity of Reagan’s Voodoo Economics.
What would $378,000,000,000 do at home? You mean, besides help rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Besides providing adequate health care for millions? Besides improving the infrastructure of our roads? Besides finding alternative sources of energy? Besides… oh, never mind.
Goldwater would not fit into today’s GOP. He was practically a liberal at the end of his days, supporting issues such as gays in the military for instance. His libertarian streak would definitely clash with the GOP’s authoritarian streak.
His solution to the Vietnam War was to use nukes, right? So if he was around today he might advocate dropping a few babies on Baghdad I guess…
Well, the voters are surely tired of this war, that’s for sure. But they have also awakened to the reality that for them, the economy sucks.
Yes, I’d heard some whisper of it before, Agi, but the documentary really highlighted Goldwater’s stance on on gays and abortion. My favorite quote was, “what does the abortion issue have to do with Conservatism?”
P.S. From what I saw in the doc, Goldwater consider anything other than tactical nuclear weapons as unacceptable. There is a scene in which he openly abhors the idea of one bomb taking out a whole city.
I think every dead President must be screaming in Bush’s ear. a lot of live ones are too. He is deaf.
Cool. I’ll have to check out this documentary…