Current location:	Who cares
Current mood:	disgusted
Current music:	The Association Greatest Hits (CD) / The Association
Entry tags:	gop, jack_kemp, jeb_bush, politics, ronald_reagan

Jack Kemp Croaked

 

Three days ago, former Congressman Jack Kemp kicked the bucket. This occasion has brought forth a whole bunch of very predictable bullshit.

In legislative form, it became a bill called Kemp-Roth that he sponsored in the House of Representatives. William Roth, a Delaware Republican, would sponsor it in the Senate. It met resistance and failed at first. But as in his football career, Kemp kept going deep.

The concept was daring: cut federal income tax rates over three years. He would reward the risk takers, savers and investors by letting them keep more of what they earned. He would not spread the wealth around. He would let people create and keep their own.

By 1980, he had convinced candidate Ronald Reagan that it would be the mechanism of economic recovery, and the idea was written into the Republican platform. In August 1981, President Reagan was signing it into law. The rest, as they say, is history.

-- The Passing Of A Champion

What they fail to tell you is that the big "selling point" for Kemp-Roth was that a reduction is tax rates would increase revenues to the government. (The meaning behind the "Laffer Curve".) Only a politician would think that giving the gov't more money is a good thing. The more money the gov't has, the greater the opportunity for gov't to grow ever larger and more intrusive. None of that extra revenue ever went towards paying down the debt that piled up in the decades before Kemp-Roth was first proposed. During the Reagan years, the deficit grew at an accellerating pace. It did not go down. Not by so much as a single dime.

Sorry, Kemp is no hero.

Speaking of Reagan

This is also the occasion for more fellating of the withered old cock.

It's out of character for Jeb Bush — considered by many champions of economic freedom to be the best of the Bushes — to call on fellow Republicans to distance themselves from Reaganism. So it was a shock to find the Washington Times on Sunday with a story reporting that the brother and son of presidents said it was "Time to leave Reagan behind," as the paper's headline put it.

The crux of what Bush said at the launching of the National Council for a New America (NCNA) was actually that "our ideas need to be forward-looking and relevant. I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia and the good old days in the messaging. I mean it's great, but it doesn't draw people toward your cause."

-- Is America Bushed With Reagan?

Jeb Bush is absolutely right about this. It is high time that Reagan was allowed to rot in peace. He wasn't all that good anyway. Articles like this point out the need for the very thing that Jeb Bush has called for. Reagan was always the Great Deciever and he's still at it from the grave. Remember that this is the man that:

• Passed himself off as a man of small town, Middle America while living for decades in one of LA's most exclusive suburbs.


• Passed himself off as the "family values" candidate after having thrown away one wife -- the mother of his children -- in order to marry the younger, yiffier, Nancy.


• Was so estranged from his children that not a single one of his progeny ever visited him at the White House in eight years.


• Conned the Fundievangelicals™ into believing he was "God's candidate" while religiously avoiding church.


• Made promises to the Fundievangelicals™ which he had not the slightest intention to fulfill.

These are just some of the many lies, deceptions, and hypocrisies of this man. He came to Washington promising to "drain the swamp", cut back the bureaucracy, and in the end, made it bigger. He didn't whack a single department, but rather added the utterly worthless Dept. of Veterans Affairs. He promised fiscal responsibility; his smallest deficit was bigger than the largest deficit of his immediate predecessor: the "tax and spend" Jimmy Carter.

Jeb Bush is absolutely right: time to distance the GOP from "Reaganism". Unlike fine wine, it hasn't improved with age. Is Jeb Bush the man to do it?

Furthermore, judging from most of those involved in the new group Bush was helping inaugurate, it can be expected to be dedicated to the renewal of Reaganite principles of low taxes, reduced government, a strong defense and traditional values.

They include Govs. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi, innovators friendly to free-market principles. 2008 presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney also sits on the panel, along with last year's GOP nominee, Sen. John McCain — indications that the group seeks stature and influence in the years leading up to the next presidential election.

I guess Congressman Ron Paul's invite hasn't arrived yet. "National Council for a New America": looks like the same old shit to me.

Neither the Republicans nor the mainstream or semi-mainstream "conservative" press has learned a goddamned thing. Nostalgia for the "glory days" of the "Gipper" isn't going to cut it. Creating a council for a "New America" and filling it with the same old political hacks isn't going to fool anyone for very long. Appealing to "traditional values" isn't going to work. This isn't the Carter years all over again, and the Fundievangelicals™ won't remain stupid forever.

The GOP doesn't need another Reagan, and it damn sure doesn't need another Bush.

If Jeb Bush were truly serious about this, Ron Paul is the first person he would have brought on board. If these "conservatives" were serious, we'd be hearing a lot less Kemp and Reagan, and a lot more Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Washington. Then, and only then, would the GOP stand a chance of returning to majority party status in its own right, and not just because yet another Democratic administration fucked up mightily.

Jeb's NCNA is no threat to politics as usual. It isn't going to help put yet another Bush in the White House either.