Category: The Atlasphere

Radley Balko has an excellent article on FoxNews exposing the modern Republican party’s abysmal record of enforcing limited government. Not that this is a news flash, for most people. But it’s alarming nonetheless, and Balko does a nice job of summarizing the key failures.
His article begins:

The Washington Post reports that in 1987, President Ronald Reagan vetoed a transportation bill passed by Congress because it had 157 “earmarks”â?? money set aside for Congress members’ pet projects that would ostensibly be considered too wasteful to pass as laws on their own merit.
Reagan made a show of his veto. It was a symbolic stroke against government waste, against the Democratsâ?? tradition of, for example, diverting every federal highway through West Virginia, then naming it after Sen. Robert Byrd.
Fast-forward to 2005. Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. Early on a Saturday morning in August â?? the day of the week, and the month of the year, least likely to attract media attention â?? President Bush signed into law a highway bill passed by his own party with more than 6,000 earmarked projects.
Bush signed the bill after sternly telling his party he’d veto any highway bill that spent more than $256 billion. He promptly “adjusted” that figure to $284 billion after complaints from party leaders. The bill Bush ultimately signed came at a price of $286 billion, $295 billion if you count a few provisions disguised to make the bill look cheaper than it actually is. Not exactly holding the line.
The Republican Party’s wholesale abandonment of limited government principles has been on display since President Bush took office. Government spending under the GOP’s reign has soared to historic highs, any way you want to measure it. And in stark contrast to President Reagan â?? or even the president’s own fatherâ??President Bush refuses to rein in spending. He hasnâ??t used his veto a single time since taking office â?? the longest such streak in U.S. history.

See the full article for more details.

Paul Eidelberg, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, detects the ideas behind the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. He writes:

It began when the leaders of Israel, superficially good men, began to consort with profoundly bad men. I am referring to Israeli prime ministers, the leaders of a reputed democracyâ??ostensibly a good regimeâ??began to negotiate publicly with Arab tyrants, i.e., the rulers of bad regimesâ??and did so in quest of â??peace.â?
By negotiating with bad men, Israeli prime ministers dignified them and thereby obscured the difference between just and unjust regimes. In other words, Israeli prime ministers initiated what is now called â??moral equivalence.â? By so doing, they morally disarmed their own people. They lowered their peopleâ??s moral standards as well as their peopleâ??s sense of honor.

In an op-ed at the onset of the withdrawal process two years ago, Robert Tracinski observed:

Justice demands that one judge rationally the character and conduct of those one deals with, rewarding the good and punishing the evil. To insist on diplomacy as an unqualified virtue–regardless of the nature and conduct of one’s foe–does not save lives or resolve conflicts; it merely rewards and emboldens the aggressors.

As Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”