Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “"What's Bad for General Motors Is Good for the DNC!"”

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June 6, 2008

"What's Bad for General Motors Is Good for the DNC!"

Hatched by Dafydd

Over at Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan speaks for nearly all pundits, spread across three parties unto the tenth generation, when he writes:

Of course, the worse the economy gets, the better it is politically for Obama...

This is Conventional Wisdom 101. But why? What is the connection?

CW 102 explains CW 101 by postulating the following syllogism:

Economy heads south;

Voters decide to blame the "party in charge" and punish them at the polls;

The elite media always declare that the party in charge is the Republican Party;

Thus, the voters will inevitably punish the GOP (and the country) in November by voting Democratic. It's elementary!

The truly sad thing is that Democrats actually do believe this; they believe what's bad for America is good for them, because they can play "pin the blame on the elephant" and parlay some terrible catastrophe -- an earthquake, an act of terrorism, an economic challenge -- into furthering their congressional careers.

But there's something kind of weird about this syllogism... for some odd reason, whenever anything bad happens that (we are told) will earn the ire of the electorate against the party in charge -- it always seems to turn out that the responsible party is the Republican Party.

Today the voters will blame the GOP because, while Democrats control Congress, a Republican sits in the White House. But conversely, back in the 1990s, the voters blamed the GOP... after all, while a Democrat sat in the White House, it was the Republicans who controlled Congress!

I understand why the elite media would always blame Republicans for anything bad; they're knee-jerk New Left liberals who vote 93% for Democrats.

I even understand why commentators on the right so often assume voters will blame the Republicans: First, they see all the other pundits around them blaming Republicans, and if they did the opposite, they would experience cognitive dissonance; second, Republicans by their very natures tend to be dour and pessimistic... so much so that they, themselves, reflexively assume that everything that can go wrong will... and even things that can't go wrong will find a way to do so anyway.

You just watch: The closer we slide to the election, the more depressed and apocalyptic will be the Republican and conservative columnists, talking heads, and bloggers, no matter what the facts on the ground may be; the perennial pundits' pessimism and pity parade will once again take over Fox News Channel, the WSJ and the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and virtually the entire dextrosphere.

In terms of Republican Party temperment (as opposed to policy), Ronald Reagan is the exception; Richard "They're coming to take me away, ha ha!" Nixon is more the rule.

But understanding a bizarre psychological syndrome of conspiracy and defeat is not the same as believing it. Here's a new syllogism that begins from my own core political belief:

Contrary to what the Left thinks, ordinary voters are not utter fools;

If the economy goes south, they will want to punish the predators and incompetents who caused it to go south;

Whichever party is best able to make a logical and rational argument that the economic problems are caused by the policies of the other guys will be rewarded at the polls;

The biggest economic problem today is the ludicrously high cost of fuel, which is driving up the price of virtually everything else;

The primary cause of that high cost is legislation preventing us from exploiting our own energy resources;

The party responsible for that legislation is the Democratic Party, not the GOP;

Thus if John McCain will actually articulate that argument and run on policies that would significantly increase our energy production -- something that Barack H. Obama will not, cannot do -- McCain has a very good shot at actually being rewarded by voters in November;

Even better, if the GOP across the board were to run on that platform in congressional, gubernatorial, and other races, it might mitigate by future-policy promises the "bad branding" that threatens to decimate Republicans once again, as it did in 2006.

The only really big "ifs" in this syllogism, I believe, are the last two points, (7) and (8). So far, neither the presumptive Republican nominee nor Republicans running for reelection has embraced the stark difference between the two parties: In general, the GOP defines success through growth and expansion -- while Democrats define their success through contraction, contrition, and condemnation of everything American.

But right now, McCain is still stuck on globaloney hysteria, while Republican congressmen running for reelection stand on the brink of accepting the Devil's bargain that the California GOP bought into long ago: Accepting permanent minority status in exchange for perpetual reelection. This is the basest of bargains: GOP incrumbents get their perks, and we get punked.

You can't recapture Congress by graciously conceding defeat -- months before the election!

Boldness is what we need now: Instead of accepting our political dhimmitude at the hands of Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 85%) and Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 93%, not counting missed votes), we must risk everything on a real campaign to take back the Congress.

The GOP needs a new national strategy, similar in some ways to the Contract With America in 1994; but that contract was entirely procedural and inside-baseball. What we need today is a substantive national strategy.

Obama has his "American Moment" speech; fine. But for those of us who want America to last more than a moment, let's have a strategy based around the theme, Vote For an American Future:

1 - Vote for American energy for America and our friends

America is an energy nation: We use a lot, but we have a lot more reserves than we're allowed by law to tap.

We need to drill for oil everywhere on American territory where oil is to be found, as well as in international waters; but we'll use American high-technology to drill in an environmentally safe and sound way.. Produce energy for America, while preserving nature's beauty for all Americans.

With oil above $130 per barrel and people feeling the pinch everywhere, we no longer have the luxury of leaving our oil fields and natural gas mines unexplored and untapped. We must drill in the Bakken oil formation, off the two coasts, in ANWR, in the Gulf of Mexico, in international waters in the Caribbean and elsewhere. We mine oil shale and extract the oil. We mine for natural gas. We begin building smaller nuclear reactors using the safest of modern designs... and the federal government should insure them.

2 - Vote for an economy of wealth, not illth

A simple rule that applies universally: You cannot tax yourself into prosperity. We need some form of taxation to pay for things we need; but we don't need taxes to "level the playing field" by crippling successful people so that life's losers don't feel so bad.

Unless we make the tax cuts permanent, they'll expire (the Democrats forced that poison pill on us)... resulting in the largest tax increase in American history. But we need to go farther: We need to eliminate the alternative minimum tax altogether, cut the capital-gains tax to zero, and shift to a "fair tax" flat tax.

And we "pay for" these tax cuts, not with more tax increases, but by actually cutting spending -- reducing entitlements (see 4 below) and trimming unnecessary government departments and agencies -- and by growing the economy, letting Americans keep, spend, and invest more of what they earn.

3 - Vote for security, not surrender

We stand at a tipping point of history: We have it in our power to destroy the Iran/al-Qaeda axis and secure not just America but the West for decades. But we need to mobilize more than just our military, brilliant as it is. This existential struggle cannot be won by bullets and bombs alone.

We need to bring together defense, diplomacy, intelligence, and the ideology of freedom in this world-wide conflict. Americans instinctively distrust "nation building;" but that makes us ideal stewards to help failed states in the "non-integrated gap" to rebuild their own nations -- with our support and know-how.

We must completely rebuild our intelligence agencies from the ground up. They have failed terribly in recent years, but not because of the men and women who work tirelessly to get inside our enemies' heads. They failed because we're asking our intelligence agencies to do things they were never designed to do; they were birthed during the great wars of the twentieth century and raised during the cold war... but this is the twenty-first century, and we're fighting an enemy we've never faced before: A world-wide death cult that wants to destroy the entire modern world and drag us all back to the seventh century.

We fight on behalf of modernity -- so we need modern, up to date, redesigned, and reenergized intelligence agencies to be our eyes and ears.

Finally, the enemy has an ideology of repression, human sacrifice, and slavery. It sounds horrible to us; but to Muslim subjects living under totalitarian tyrants, peasant tribesmen whose world is a nightmare, the promise that, if they'll slaughter the innocent in this world, they'll gain paradise in the next must sound like a bargain.

You can't fight something with nothing: We need to create an ideological counterinsurgency to fight the war of ideas with the Iran/al-Qaeda axis. We need to spread the ideology of freedom, hope, security, stability, and the rights of the individual across the hellholes of the Earth. We must give potential terrorist recruits alternatives to that dreadful path, if we're ever going to be safe ourselves.

4 - Vote for the ownership society

So-called "entitlements" are bleeding us dry. Out of the $3 trillion budget, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone account for nearly 50% of spending. This is completely unsustainable; either we find a long-term solution to out of control entitlement programs, or else we give up on America.

The problem is right in the name: "Entitlement" programs are services and money that we've told citizens they're "entitled" to extract from the government, no matter how fiscally catastrophic that is. The amount we pay each recipient increases by more than inflation every year, while the number of recipients grow as we all live longer, due to better medical care, and lead healthier lives. Add those together, and you have a prescription for disaster.

Like the intelligence agencies, entitlement programs were created during a very different era, when people didn't live much past 65. Senior citizens, the disabled, and the poor had very real problems that were going unaddressed; and these three programs and similar ones were created by Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson out of compassion. But their compassion turned out to be based on extremely bad economics.

We don't live there anymore... so we need a new paradigm to solve the old problems. The solution is to shift retirement planning and health care for the elderly, disabled, and poor from a "hand-out" mentality to an "ownership" mentality: Turn benefits into investments, and let the very people who need them control them.

This saves money two ways: First, when you're living on other people's money, it's easy to slip into the trap of "the sky's the limit;" but when you own your own programs, you have an incentive to avoid waste, fraud, and abuse. Second, owning your own retirement program is more economical in the long run for exactly the same reason that owning your own home is more economical than renting all your life: It's an asset that appreciates.

It would save big money for the country, too. The government invests today's Social Security so badly, it barely earns interest at all; that's because the feds want to be able to loot the money at a moment's notice, so it can't be tied up in anything high-yielding.

The government must pay for every dime of retirement out of current receipts. But in an ownership society, Social Security is like a government-guaranteed 401K that earns most or even all of its own expenditures by interest paid.

So your kids (and grandkids) won't be breaking their backs supporting you; with the same SSI tax you pay now, you'll have an account that could well earn more money per year than you take out of it. Thus, no matter how long you and your spouse live, you won't run out of money... and you can even leave it to your kids as a nest egg.

5 - Vote for Capitalism, not crony liberalism and corruption

Earmarks are the corruption of ruling elite; they're personal budget items stuffed into legislation in the dead of night, often without any other senator or representative even seeing them. They pour money into the pockets of special interests, to the tune of hundreds of thousands, millions, and sometimes even tens of millions of dollars.

The recipient then kicks back some of that money to the reelection campaign of the member who pushed through the earmark. Earmarks as close as you can get to out and out bribery without being arrested.

The Republican Party has tried time and again to get the rest of Congress to eliminate earmarks altogether, but the Democrats won't do it. John McCain has refused to insert earmarks into legislation for many years now -- and his constituents know that and respect him for his principled stand.

But America simply cannot wallow in quasi-legal corruption. It brings our entire government into disrepute. Neither Republicans nor Democrats can resist the temptation to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars for a twine museum or cookbook library in their home districts... or even giving public money to local churches, including the Rev. Michael Pfleger's church in Chicago.

Earmarks to a politician are like whiskey to an alcoholic: He can't have "just one drink." The only solution is that we must do away with earmarks, root and branch. Every expenditure in a piece of legislation must go through the regular process, with all senators and representatives getting a chance to vote up or down.

When no member of Congress has the power to sneak your tax money to his own favorite business (the one that supports his reelection most heavily); when you can look on the internet and find where every dollar of your tax money went; then the citizens can regain control of their government once more.

E pluribus unum

Democrats have controlled Congress for the past two years, and they had significant veto power even before the 2006 elections. The president is not a dictator; he can only sign the bills he's sent... he can't simply make up legislation and put it into effect by decree. There is no reason to assume from the outset that everybody in America thinks every bad thing that happens is all Bush's fault -- or that every Republican running is a Bush "mini-me." Voters are not stupid; they're you and me and that feller behind the tree.

Politically, an economic downturn is going to hurt whichever party is perceived as not having a clue how to grow the economy again. The only plan the Democrats have for growing the economy is to tax us all to death.

It shouldn't be too hard to show voters that we Republicans have a better plan than "taxicide." But we have to be unified. I want to see the party develop some sort of "Vote for an American Future" contract with voters: This is what we stand for; this is where we're miles ahead of the Democrats; this is what we will do if elected. Then each GOP candidate should flesh out what exactly these points mean in terms that resonate with his own constituents.

If we do that, we'll very quickly "rebrand" the Republican Party... and we might lose hardly any seats at all.

Heck, we could conceivably even gain seats; it wouldn't take much to flip either the House or Senate back to GOP control. But if Republicans stubbornly refuse to unite; if they don't support the Republican nominee for president; if they try to run as "diet liberals," then we're going to get kicked in the stomach by Jubilation T. Jackass.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 6, 2008, at the time of 6:39 PM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: GW

I agree with all that you have written, though I do have a question about Social Security. My understanding of that program is that all social security reciepts go into the general account where it can be spent annually by Congress - thus setting up what amounts to the only legal Ponzi scheme in America. Is that incorrect?

The above hissed in response by: GW at June 6, 2008 10:43 PM

The following hissed in response by: CSK

Dafydd; You probably missed this, and it's understandable. I've only seen it this once. Here's a link:

http://conservativesuperiority.com/2008/05/22/sounds-like-a-plan/

Sounds like a plan…
May 22, 2008 · Print This Article

The Republican Study Committee (RSC) has a plan. RSC is a caucus of more than 100 of the U.S. House of Representatives’ most conservative Republicans, and their Action Plan for GOP members of the House was announced two days ago. You probably haven’t heard about it before this posting, because the media is unilaterally ignoring it.

Here’s a summary:

1) THE END OF PORK-BARREL SPENDING
House Republicans are committed to ending pork-barrel spending. We will not wait on the Democrat Majority to end “Bridges to Nowhere” and “Monuments to Me”— we declare an immediate earmark moratorium and pledge to reform the system. We also pledge to uphold any future veto of a spending bill that is pork laden and does not lead to a balanced budget.
*
2) LIMITING WASHINGTON TAXES AND SPENDING TO WHAT MIDDLE CLASS FAMILIES CAN AFFORD
House Republicans are committed to eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax and preventing the scheduled tax increases in 2010 from taking more from the paychecks of hard-working, middle class families. We are also committed to amending the U.S. Constitution to limit the growth of federal spending to the level at which middle class Americans can afford. Except in time of war or national emergency, our spending limit amendment would prohibit federal spending from growing faster than the economy.
*
3) A FAIR, SIMPLE TAX CODE THAT AMERICANS CAN UNDERSTAND AND HAVE A RIGHT TO EXPECT......

There's more, and it's all good. Now if only they can get some traction.

The above hissed in response by: CSK at June 6, 2008 11:55 PM

The following hissed in response by: CSK

And another thought; McCain should pound home the idea that if our Social Security tax payments had been invested in personal accounts, seniors would most likely be retiring as millionaires, instead of pitiful paupers gratefully waiting for their next pitiful Social Security checks.

The above hissed in response by: CSK at June 7, 2008 12:03 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

GW:

My understanding of that program is that all social security reciepts go into the general account where it can be spent annually by Congress.... Is that incorrect?

Not quite correct, GW. All the money collected goes, by law, into the Social Security Trust Fund.

...Whence it is immediately borrowed, the loan shifted to the general account, and Congress spends it as Congress pleases.

But they do leave IOUs behind. I'm sure you feel much better about things, now that you know how securely your SSI and SE taxes are held.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at June 7, 2008 4:52 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dan Kauffman

Drill Now

Drill Here

Pay Less

The above hissed in response by: Dan Kauffman at June 7, 2008 6:07 AM

The following hissed in response by: Voiceguy in LA

You write:

We must completely rebuild our intelligence agencies from the ground up. They have failed terribly in recent years, but not because of the men and women who work tirelessly to get inside our enemies' heads. They failed because we're asking our intelligence agencies to do things they were never designed to do; they were birthed during the great wars of the twentieth century and raised during the cold war... but this is the twenty-first century, and we're fighting an enemy we've never faced before: A world-wide death cult that wants to destroy the entire modern world and drag us all back to the seventh century. We fight on behalf of modernity -- so we need modern, up to date, redesigned, and reenergized intelligence agencies to be our eyes and ears.

I agree with the sentiment behind these platitudes, but they really are nothing but platitudes.

What does "from the ground up" actually mean? Are we going to fire everybody, and then start from scratch? And do what? Hire a bunch of well-intentioned amateurs?

Is there nothing whatsoever worth keeping?

I am not an intelligence expert, but I have spent many years in large organizations. I can't think of an example in history of any organization that was actually "rebuilt from the ground up." I have seen in my lifetime a number of organizations quickly destroyed in attempts to restructure them.

Do you have any specific suggestions? One thing I have seen repeatedly mentioned is eliminating the ludicrous honeycomb of conflicting and overlapping Congressional oversight. Another suggestion that occurs to me would be serious investigation and actual prosecution of national security leaks to the New York Times et al. But these have to do with the meta-structure surrounding intelligence, not the underlying structure itself.

What activities are being engaged in that should be stopped? What activities are not being engaged in that should be started? What gaps exist in talent, capabilities, resources, technology, etc.? Realistically, where do we find the people to staff the newly-invented agency(ies)? College recruiting? Specialized training centers?

And how do we find the political courage to recognize things for what they really are, rather than labeling them with euphemisms and pretending they don't exist, while struggling to avoid offending groups like CAIR that are fronts for terrorists?

I don't mean to sound overly harsh here. You have a good, analytical mind -- what should people actually do to solve this problem?

The above hissed in response by: Voiceguy in LA at June 7, 2008 10:02 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Voiceguy in L.A.:

I am not an intelligence expert, but I have spent many years in large organizations. I can't think of an example in history of any organization that was actually "rebuilt from the ground up." I have seen in my lifetime a number of organizations quickly destroyed in attempts to restructure them.

I'll give you a very apropos example: The creation of the CIA itself.

When WWII ended, we had a very effective military intelligence organization, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services); its mission was to produce wartime targeting information and to find potential defectors from Nazi Germany and other Axis nations willing to turn traitor.

The OSS was organized under the War Department and run in the same rapid-response, freewheeling way that the military ran the war (very effectively, for the most part).

But beginning right after the war, we realized that our new enemy was the evil empire... and that we were very unlikely to be fighting them the way we fought the Nazis and Japanese.

So we abolished the OSS and created a new intelligence agency, the CIA -- which was organized under the State Department, not the War (now Defense) Department.

The CIA was a complete new agency: completely new bureaucracy, chain of command, mission, funding, and personnel. It had no capability for target acquisition or any other specifically military task; its job was to infiltrate the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations and analyze intercepts of their communications obtained by the National Security Agency, NSA, in order to ferret out tactical and strategic political intelligence that could be used in the high-level diplomatic chess game we played with the enemy.

It served us quite well during the cold war; policy makers got a lot of very good intelligence, which they used -- occasionally intelligently. They also got bad intelligence and missed many things -- the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of Khomeinism; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- which were mostly attributable to the decimation of our intelligence capabilities, especially humint, under presidents like John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton.

But by and large, we had the intelligence agency we needed... then.

But now we're in a totally different type of war. The reason that the CIA had no idea that 9/11 was on its way and has been of so little help in the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis is that they are set up to spy on modern superpowers:

Superpowers send signals that can be intercepted by the NSA;

They have ponderous bureaucracies that can be exploited via disaffected bureaucrats who become our moles;

They make grand, strategic, political moves that can be analyzed;

They have armies that must be mobilized before they can do anything;

They have finances that exist within the legitimate international financial markets, hence can easily be tracked;

They have internal political struggles that can be monitored, and so forth.

But our new enemies are small groups of absolute fanatics; they have little to no communication with any central base; they operate entirely on their own timetables, with their targets and motivation based upon a publicly disseminated ideology (using the internet, radio, CDs, and DVDs), so we never know who is going to strike where; they exploit the cracks in our legal and criminal justice systems that are endemic under a free society; and they are not only willing to die, they long to die during the attack -- hence cannot be deterred by any threat.

We need to do what we did in 1946: Completely revamp our political-intelligence system into a broadly defined COIN-Intel agency... that is, one that uses the flow of the religious and ideological messaging via new media, along with a heavy emphasis on long-term infiltration and good, old-fashioned international police work and military action to trap information about the intentions and capabilities of terrorist groups -- the way that the CIA used the flow of bureaucratic messages, political maneuvers, and electronic signals to trap information about the intentions and capabilities of the Soviets.

NOTE: Throughout, I use COIN to mean "counterinsurgency," not the cold-war era "counterintelligence."

Our military (targeting) intel is pretty good right now; I don't think that's a problem. We have Predators, manned aircraft, sub-orbital spy rockets, and spy satellites. We get good target-acquisition intelligence from our troops in the field. We do need to build on what we've done via COIN in Iraq and spread those techniques throughout the hundreds of other locations where we have military forces monitoring local insurgencies; but that's a well understood process.

The CIA needs to go the way of the OSS; it's no longer needed, because there is no other superpower. There are other dangerous countries; but they're mostly dangerous because they might hand off WMD to autonomous terrorist cells.

We don't need to get rid of most of the personnel, though a lot of retraining is going to be required. But we need complete reorganization and remissioning... and in particular, we must get intelligence out of the clutches of the State Department mentality: An excess of Statethink is what has led to so many deliberate CIA and NSA leaks to the media, attempting to turn policy back to the European, "Great Game," John le Carré vision of intelligence that has infused our CIA from the beginning.

That means we need to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency and create a separate agency, which could be under the DHS table of organization with a principal on the National Security Council and a deputy briefing the president every day.

Honestly, it's administratively (and politically) easier to dynamite the CIA and build a new COIN-Intel agency than make the drastic reforms that would be necessary in the current agency. You cannot simply "reform" the existing bureaucracy; there is nothing that animates entrenched bureaucrats more -- or brings out more of their basic genius for survival -- than attempting to radically change the bureaucracy itself.

The best way -- and I'll grant this would be very difficult politically, because so many members of Congress have a vested interest in maintaining the intelligence status quo -- would be to create a new agency run by veteran military commanders of counterinsurgency operations; academics who have spent their lives studying insurgency and Islamic terrorism (Fred Kagen at AEI, for example); former high-level intelligence professionals whose careers were mostly spent as actual spooks -- covert agents, not analysts; and specialists in foreign interdiction of contraband... top people at DEA would probably be very good in this mission.

The focus would be entirely on preventing future attacks -- not accumulating information for diplomatic advantage, as the CIA does now; the remnants of the CIA could become a Diplomatic Intelligence Service for that function. (And certainly not punishment after the fact, which would remain the responsibility of the FBI.)

The primary taskss would be:

Locating and infiltrating terrorist groups and setting them up for assassination or capture;

Infiltrating the governments of rogue States to gain intelligence about covert assistance to terrorist groups and WMD production and distribution -- with an associated rapid-reaction military force that could be deployed under the command of the intelligence agency (so it needs to have former or current military personnel with command experience using COIN);

Interrogation of capturees to find specifics about pending plots;

Hunting down illegal arms and WMD merchants and destroying their organizations;

Probably other tasks, but all related to rapidly locating small, autonomous terrorist groups with plans to strike us, getting the full particulars, and getting a counterforce in place to prevent the attack. The CIA, the NSA, the DIA, and the FBI were never designed to do any of this... and none of them is very good at it.

I know exactly what you're thinking, and yes, you're exactly right: The CIA must be abolished and replaced by an American version of Israel's Mossad. But politically, that is certainly not something we should say out loud during the hearings!

I'm not an intelligence expert either, VG; but I have thought about this for a long time. I wasn't just speaking in "platitudes"... I was writing with an eye to a campaign paper that Republicans would use to run against Democrats in November. Each of these "platitudes" (broad policies, actually) would have to be fleshed out in position papers that should be available on the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committee websites.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at June 7, 2008 6:24 PM

The following hissed in response by: KarmiCommunist

3 - Vote for security, not surrender

What are we facing with Obama? Another Clinton or Carter...at best. Half of America wants that, and I am at the point of hoping they get their wish.......nevermind.

Obama's Plan To Disarm The U.S.

Defense Policy: In the middle of a war on two fronts, Barack Obama plans to gut the military. He also wants to dismantle our nuclear arsenal. And he wants to keep you in the dark about it.

The above hissed in response by: KarmiCommunist at June 7, 2008 8:49 PM

The following hissed in response by: Cain

An excellent list DaH. The only thing I would add would be a blurb on establishing a coherent border protection policy. Something along the lines of actually protecting the border would be nice. Polls seem to show this would be a runaway winner and another issue the Dems are hopelessly cornered on. Why do we keep letting those snakes out of the trap?

If only our conservative congress-critters would find the stones to implement something this obvious. Americans respond well to conservative boldness based in reason (i.e. Reagan, Contract with America).

The above hissed in response by: Cain at June 9, 2008 11:38 AM

The following hissed in response by: Consul-At-Arms

I've quoted you and linked to you here.

The above hissed in response by: Consul-At-Arms at June 16, 2008 5:56 PM