Me too Republicans

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

The current U.S. financial crisis is the result of government attempts to inject artificial “fairness” into the complexity of the market’s law of supply and demand. The advocates of this intervention place the blame for the current economic calamity on Wall Street greed and find its solution in even more regulatory oversight by the micromanagers of economic “fairness.”  With few exceptions, the majority of Republicans agree. Most Republicans are conservative in one very important respect: their willingness to conserve big-government’s status quo.

Sen. John McCain campaigns under a bipartisan banner. His advocates, including the former Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, say that the Arizona Senator works well with Democrats. This is an all too familiar trait among post New Deal Republicans and hardly the political novelty McCain would have us believe. This explains the close nature of the current presidential contest.

The media is perplexed that Sen. Barak Obama isn’t further ahead of McCain in the polls this close to the election. In fact, the surprise is that McCain is not far ahead of his big-government opponent – especially at a time when that big government is directly responsible for the subprime mortgage meltdown that triggered our current financial calamity.

Republican bipartisans were complicit with the Democratic social engineers who triggered our financial crisis. This denied Republicans the moral high ground needed to justify a full-throated ‘I told you so’ to the opponent party and the American people.

In 1979, candidate Ronald Reagan was persona non grata to the accommodationists of the Republican leadership. This gave him the unique ability to attack the nanny-state policies that gave America high taxes, high unemployment, high inflation and high interest rates, which, in Jimmy Carter’s words, put the nation in a “malaise.”

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” said Reagan in his first inaugural address. If it even entered John McCain’s mind to utter words similar to Reagan’s, his doing so would engender laughter from the political Left and Right. “Reaching across the isle” destroyed the very legitimacy of our two party system and confused the moral ground on which an opposition party should  stand when advocating real change to the status quo.

If McCain looses this November, Republicans need to remember this: if you drive the get-away car, don’t be surprised when you’re charged with committing the robbery.

--Mr. Curmudgeon