Truth Teller

Saying the obvious, Ronald Reagan's own budget director (David Stockman is still alive? Who knew?) calls out Congressional Republicans. To people with fingers in their ears, saying "la la la la la" as loud as they can, he argues:

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

The article, which appears in NYT online next to an ad (when I first saw it, anyway) showing Fred Thompson asking for help in keeping the Bush tax cuts (because god knows we need to help the rich actors, for the good of... the rich actors) also says:

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. [Emphasis mine, but it should be everyone's.]

Okay, yeah, the Keynesianism dig is aimed at Democrats. Nevertheless, it's refreshing, if also amusingly ironic, to have the guy who engineered the first shot at destroying fiscal responsibility under wrongly-revered Ronnie Reagan speak up now. A few decades too late, but still...

Andrew Sullivan, among the last thoughtful conservatives writing in public, had this to say after reading Stockman's piece:

No intellectually honest person can hold Barack Obama responsible for this long term sabotage of America's fiscal health. The spending he has authorized has to be seen in the context of the massive financial crisis that nearly caused the second Great Depression and may well still cause a lost generation of output and jobs and productive lives.

But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.

Such reality-based thinking, of course, has been and will always be thoroughly rejected by the RWS™ and their teabagging fodder.