Chris Good, riffing off David Corn:
It is fair to say that the Republican Party is being tugged to the right. With the party in the minority, conservatism has become a self-driven thing, willing to turn on the GOP establishment. It probably makes Republicans in D.C. nervous; conservatives have shown their willingness to support a third-party candidate, and there’s a looming threat that credible Republican politicians will face brutal primary battles backed by conservative activists, FreedomWorks, and the Club for Growth.
There’s no parallel pressure from moderates to tone down the messaging. The backlash over Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim is the only mitigating lesson on blowing out the putative effects of Obama’s policies as far as humanly possible, and establishment Republicans will be left to gleefully and grimly warn that health care, cap-and-trade, and stimulus spending will mean the end of everything. (And who’s to say it won’t? If the movie 2012 taught us anything, it’s that particles can start fluctuating at will.) In 2010, we won’t yet know whether health reform will work as intended, so all these accusations will simply hang in the ether, untethered to verifiable fact.
But if Republicans don’t strike those notes, the conservatives will be left a little disappointed, and that’s not what the GOP wants right now.
Personally, I think this is a dumb strategy. If they were smart, they’d get all David Broder/Mitch Daniels budget scold on our asses. Not that that would be any more honest, it would just make them seem less frightening. The Khmer Rogue scares people and that’s not a good thing.
But the key phrase here for me is “untethered to verifiable fact”. Good says (not incorrectly) that this may be exacerbated by the fact that HCR won’t have kicked in yet, but there’s something bigger than that going on: everything about our public dialog is untethered to verifiable fact, whether it’s climate change, the economy, national security, even to some extent the president’s place of birth.
I don’t know what the right description is here: “post-reality”, “post-truth”?
Derelict
This should be an interesting election year. The TeaBaggers will be out in full force, still flush with their “victory” in NY-23. They’ll be pushing HARD to eliminate any GOP candidate who does not meet their purity standards.
We’ll see how America reacts to true extreme-right candidates.
Tomlinson
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
We’re at Anger. I’m guessing we go into the 2010 elections somewhere between Bargaining and Depression.
dr. bloor
Post-knowledge. The Khmer Rouge is a pretty apt analogy.
El Cid
Corn’s original gets to the core:
By the way, how on Earth could they prefer “Obacalypse” to “Barackalypse”? It’s so obvious.
cmorenc
What really should concern you is all the tv sets turned to nothing but FoxNews propaganda all day long, not just in wingnut homes, but in the lobbys of businesses and the workout rooms of YMCAs across the land. Surely you’ve patronized some auto dealer’s service department getting your car worked on and been subjected to it. FoxNews defines post-fact post-knowledge, post-truth future.
Thomas
I recently heard a GOP primary candidate in my state announce his candidacy for the U.S. House. In the statement which aired on the NPR affiliate he said [paraphrasing] ‘I see what the current administration’s doing right now and I fear for my children, that someday they WON’T HAVE A UNITED STATES to grow up/live in’. Seriously.
It is one thing to say a President is changing American policy and that in your view his changes are unprecedented and we’re taking a step backward etc. etc., but where did all this rhetoric basically holidng out Obama as an existential threat come from? Its like there’s no one in the party with the credibility to be a brakeman to stop them from running over that cliff.
PaulW
The problem is that nobody who is directly harmed by the Far Right’s “untethered to verifiable truth” juggernaut – people slandered in Palin’s book, people slandered by Beck and Rush and Coulter and Malkin – is willing or able to take these jokers to court and hold them accountable. Have our defamation and libel laws been so weakened that we’re forced to live with lies and bullsh-t destroying the truth we need to operate as a functioning, free society? Our are the FauxNews media forces have too many damn deep pockets to scare off anyone afraid of court costs?
kommrade reproductive vigor
Which is why we are free to mock Republicans/Conservatives who complain that it is soooo unfair that people think they’re a bunch of raving whackaloons just because the GOP/Conservative movement has been taken over by raving whackaloons and the only time we ever hear from anyone but a raving whackaloon is when one is purity purged out of the party.
Post-wingularity.
AkaDad
Pre-rapture truth.
JGabriel
Generic GOPer House Candidate via Thomas:
Funny. I too fear that our children won’t have a United States to grow up in. Saw it happen in fact, 9/2001-1/2009.
That’s why I vote Democratic.
.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
It will be interesting to see what happens next fall. Will people in the middle support Obama and the Democrats in the saner states? I do expect that the insane states are going to be dipping their teabags and I expect some of their candidates to pick up a few seats in the House and if they are lucky, the Senate. Rachel had one of the ‘original teabaggers’ on last night and he says that the republican party is trying (and has) co-opted some teabagger groups in some areas and are working on others. It is clear that the current organizers of the teabaggers are into making money off of the venture and it will be interesting to see how many fools they can get to part with their money.
While the teabaggers want the republican party to teabag them it seems that some of them are teabagging the party itself.
El Cid
@kommrade reproductive vigor: ‘It is unfair and un-American to characterize us as raving whackaloons simply because we are raving whackaloons. The rule is that libruls and the medja are supposed to see us as we want to be seen, which is sort of like a 20 foot tall yeoman farmer in Colonialist getup but holding a WWII machine gun and going ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ against the Moozie invaders and the soci@alizers.’
JGabriel
@Thomas:
Mein Kampf.
.
SiubhanDuinne
@DougJ: “Khmer Rogue” is freakin’ brilliant! Did you just come up with that on your own, or has it been around for a while and I’ve just missed it? Whatever, it’s my giggle touchstone for the day.
SGEW
“[W]hen we talk about lying, and especially about lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are . . . . [This deception] never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.”
– Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics” in Crisis of the Republic (1972)
DougJ
“Khmer Rogue” is freakin’ brilliant! Did you just come up with that on your own, or has it been around for a while and I’ve just missed it?
Thanks. I thought of it a few weeks ago.
El Cid
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks. I didn’t catch it, I only saw “Rouge” and it didn’t make sense.
I could certainly see Saint Sarah Palin orderin’ all the intelleckshuls into the Alaskan rice / oil paddies to work, but I don’t exactly see her joining them.
Come to think of it, many people would have been better off if the original Khmer Rouge would have quit as easily as Saint Say-ruh.
David
A friend was just here from England and he was astonished at how willing the Wingnuts are to repeat and repeat obvious lies and how willing the media is to parrot the lies. Yes it’s corrosive but it’s entertaining. People become addicted to outrage.
It’s Reality TV meets Karl Rove.
burnspbesq
@PaulW:
Yes. SATSQ.
Marc
In much the same way that it is fair to say the captain of the Hindenburg didn’t quite stick the landing.
arguingwithsignposts
@burnspbesq:
Times v. Sullivan (for the slightly longer SATSQ)
dr. bloor
@PaulW:
The problem isn’t the laws, the problem is that the function of news programming is now to garner ratings rather than inform viewers. It may or may not have a particular politcal slant, but it’s all about eyeballs.
If you think we need tougher slander and libel laws, think again. Specifically, think about what 2001-2009 might have looked like if Bush’s DOJ and fellow travellers had the legal leeway to go after us. Their claims would have been baseless, but their money and power would have crushed us.
El Cid
I’m surprised there’s any length of rope left on tugging the Republicans to the right. What, the Tom DeLay Congress was some den of hippie co-ops?
kommrade reproductive vigor
You’ll work hard with a gun in your back, for a bowl of moose a day.
“X will cause the end of the world as we know it,” used to be one tool in their toolbox. Now it’s the only tool in their toolbox. Frankly, I’ve lost track of all the things that will absolutely cause the end of civilization 4evar. However, I note Massachusetts has had equal marriage rights for almost six years and I have yet to see a single barbarian horde tearing round the streets in search of gasoline.
Radon Chong
I think the phrase “Bring on the BRAWNDO!” works pretty nicely, actually, also, too.
Brian J
This is true, but only for the teabaggers. There’s still a legitimate–in the sense of their ideas not being built on lies and hysteria, but simply point of view that might differ from ours–conservative mindset represented out there, but it’s not dominating the right like the teabagger mindset is. It’s hard to have a conversation about what the right response is if one side is going to whip it out and start pissing all over the place while screaming gibberish and profanities.
There’s also the fact that these people know they can be somewhat effective by simply taking their ball and going home. It’s sad, but it’s true.
That’s one reason why I think Obama needs to start being a little tougher–not for the sake of showing he has balls, but simply because it’s going to be effective. Take financial regulation, for instance. It’s true that the Democrats aren’t that much better than Republicans, but they are better. And while it’s tough to resist the call of money from a well funded source, it’s not as if the lobbyists are literally holding a gun to the heads of these legislators. If they all decided to ignore the outside pressure, it’d be a different story. That’s not going to happen from the right, since they want to see Obama fail, but why can’t it happen from the left?
Why doesn’t Obama decide on a rigorous set of regulations (I’m not sure of what is necessary, but I think it’s fair to say that he wouldn’t include stuff that would really be harmful to businesses) and then dare the Republicans to vote against it? He can say that this is a common sense set of principles and that he realizes the bankers essentially own congress, but that it’s time for such nonsense to stop? They can do internal head counting to find out if something is possible, even if they have to build the votes over time, but if he can sell this as sticking it to Wall Street while still being a good capitalist, I suspect he and Democrats in congress would get a lot of positive attention. It would help improve the chances for all Democrats, especially ones in seats that are potential take overs.
Cure 7802
Hell, the “conservatives” have been post-reality for decades.
Jamey
Only flaw with Good’s logic is this: There are no “credible Republican politicians.”
asiangrrlMN
@JGabriel: Stole mine. Except, I would say, “I hope my hypothetical children won’t grow up in the United States I grew up in or the one we just suffered through for the eight years of the W. regime.”
MattF
The basic fascist tactic is to take advantage of a crisis of some sort– so that otherwise reasonable people will think “Well, we know they’re thugs and liars, but nice guys in a dangerous neighborhood finish last and dead.” This is why the wingers are all rooting for Al-Qaeda. I think that harping on this point is the key to discrediting them– What wingers want, what interests them is power, period. It’s the explanation for every little thing they do. It’s an obvious point, and it’s tiring to keep pointing out this one thing over and over– but it’s what you’ve got to do.
Bob In Pacifica
From the Left there’s plenty to complain about the last year of Democratic rule. The continuing oil wars, the continuing violation of civil rights in the War of Fear, the continuing wall against equal rights for gays, the timid battleplan to reverse the Depression, the very bad health care plan.
The problem is that you cannot talk rationally about any of these things with people looking for death panels and reeducation camps. You can’t even talk with them about the weather.
The Grand Panjandrum
@El Cid: David Corn is absolutely correct in his analysis and the pandering is spot on for the teabaggers and Palinites. Here is interview video of people standing in line at a Palin book signing. They believe the country is being stolen or taken from them by those mean ol’ liberals.
Redshift
@El Cid:
Yep. In a poll of the Kentucky senate primary, Rand Paul gets his strongest support from “people who think the Republican Party has become too liberal.”
Not “is”. “Has become.”
The Grand Panjandrum
@Bob In Pacifica:
Most of them don’t know the difference between weather and climate. Climate change is probably the most dire threat on our radar screen and these morons laugh it off like we’re headed for a really hot summer. So, yeah, talking to them about the weather is rather pointless.
arguingwithsignposts
@dr. bloor:
It has always been thus (colonial papers through the mid-19th century were mostly hyperpartisan). Except when objectivity entered the picture for a time while media had to appeal to the widest populace possible to appeal to general-purpose advertisers.
The Internet (and cable to some extent) blew that equation to bits. One could argue that the Times/WaPo shift to the right is an attempt to put that equation back together to maintain their massive intellectual mindshare and profits.
JGabriel
Bob In Pacifica:
“It snowed last week. What does Al Gore have to say about that, huh? Huh? Huh?”
.
Redshift
All-bullshit. Harry Frankfurt is the most important source for explaining what’s happening on the right. The reason the right-wing lies are impervious to the truth is that the people spreading them aren’t lying, they’re bullshitting — they don’t care whether it’s true or not, only that it gets the job done.
Shell
Why does this name always make me think they’re dedicated to toupees for bald men?
AkaDad
It makes me think about those pills that enhance a certain part of the male anatomy.
bemused
Newt says profile the dangerous & stop harassing the innocent. If you know who is dangerous & who is innocent in the first place…..
Conservatives are incapable of rational, logical reasoning.
Brian J
@Redshift:
I’d say that’s an isolated example, but sadly, it’s not.
Citizen_X
It’s become part of the seasonal change: every winter, it becomes impossible to discuss anthropogenic global warming in public. The discussion goes into hibernation, hiding itself among the scientific community.
Peter J
About the real Khmer Rouge (and not the Khmer Rogue, I did miss that one until SiubhanDuinne pointed it out), did a comparison with the GOP back in September.
soonergrunt
I know that it makes Anne Laurie crazy (she said as much) and others crazy when I ‘feed the trolls,’ but this is precisely why people like BoB and piss-girl (Makewi, for those who don’t get the reference) need to be attacked at every opportunity.
Either they are the wingnut base and will only react to rough treatment, or they are knowingly enabling the wingnuts and are deserving of nothing but rough treatment. There are certain lines I will never cross, and of course, it is John’s site and he sets the rules.
Tomlinson
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
I think the horde is in Andover now and is scheduled to be in Chelmsford later on today. We rotate them around to keep them sort of low profile and to make sure they hit the high-priced gas stations first.
Seriously, I have a lot of relatives in the Deep South who were worried about coming up to this state for reasons that make the raving horde statement seem not-terribly-hyperbolic. And they were genuinely shocked to see things were basically normal.
Though I have had cracks about them being surprised at seeing all the people in uniform at lunch because they didn’t figure we’d allow the military in this state. That pissed me off.
Sasha
Truthiness-esque
JGabriel
bemused:
B-b-b-b-but, it’s obvious. Dark people are dark and light people are light! Except for nazis, commies, and liberal fascists, who are all dark whatever their skin color! And the Germans and the French and the Russkies, who you can tell by their accents. And the people with crooked noses. Or limp wrist. Or a lisp. They’re all dangerous! Even the one’s who stutter …
Oops.
Well, we’re all dangerous! Except for the innocent ones — you know, blondes with American accents and white babies and anyone with white skin and no accent who’s a wearing a flag pin or has a Sarah Palin bumper sticker on their car.
.
Malron
Just finished watching the babbling airheads on “Good Morning America” get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to surf youtube videos. Just what those millions of people who lost their jobs in 2009 need to see. ABC could get the same result by going to their local library and peering over the shoulder of homeless people surfing the web and save themselves a bundle to boot.
GregB
When people say that the US should stop being “PC” they really mean that we should begin to treat Muslims the way the Germans treated the Jews during the 30’s.
-G
David
The John Birch Society is a sponsor of CPAC — it’s going to be nutty non-stop conspiracy theories from now until 2012.
JGabriel
@soonergrunt:
Enabling the massive wingnut brigades on Balloon Juice?
I don’t know, Sooner. If that’s their goal, they’ve chosen a venue with spectacularly meager returns…
.
KT
A big part of this dysfunctional dialog is the inherent complexity of real facts and the inability of most people (myself included) to discern the difference between fact and opinion. It takes a great deal of time and energy to reach a level of understanding required to distinguish fact from fiction on your own, so most people gravitate towards those who speak in terms they understand.
Unfortunately, in lieu of knowledge, we fall back on arguments that best stoke the fires of our outrage and produce the deepest feelings because, in the end, it is feelings that inspire action, not facts.
aimai
Tomlinson @ 45
I’m in MA but don’t have any southern relatives. I would love, love, love to hear more specifics about what they thought it would be like here post gay marriage? Do tell us more!
aimai
polyorchnid octopunch
Post nothing. The right word for what passes for political discourse in your country is delusional. On both sides… if the democrats think that their seeming reasonableness is going to protect them from the anger of the citizenry for the fact that they’ve been bought and paid for by the whole FIRE trap they are just as delusional as the Republicans… just not as psychotic, which in the final analysis has to be cold comfort for the US citizenry.
I fear that it’s going to take a couple of senators getting ripped apart by the mob before the political class starts rightly fearing the people.
And as for your cops… all I can say is no wonder nobody wants to visit you guys… you have a reputation around the world as being staffed by the biggest assholes on the planet.
SGEW
Re: The Khmer Rouge
I can’t think about the Khmer Rouge without remembering Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia:
“A back-to-the-land pure agrarian racist ideology with no Jewish other to get . . . . So five years of bombing, a diet of bark, bugs, lizards, and leaves up in the Cambodian jungles, an education in Paris environs in a strict Maoist doctrine with a touch of Rousseau, and other things that we will probably never know about in our lifetime. Including perhaps an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia — America . . .”
JGabriel
@GregB:
Fixed that for you. Think I’m exaggerating? Read Ann Coulter, or watch Glenn Beck.
.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@bemused:
Duh! They are the white ones! Stop searching the white people and search anyone not white! Mooslim turrists will stop trying to take over planes if they know they will be searched thoroughly!
That is what they actually believe. Every time they hear some story about some white person getting searched they come unglued a bit more.
DougJ, Khmer Rouge is perfect. Anyone who isn’t a teabagger or republican and wears glasses better keep them hidden or else. These people are nuts. The “my country was stolen from me!” fruitcakes are especially worrisome, I have never seen so many people uttering this bullshit and believing it.
If Obama was white (all, not half!) then this shit wouldn’t be happening. IMO, much of the crazier rhetoric is race driven, the reality for it exists solely between the ears of the nut who believes it and it is fed a steady diet of toxic shit from disinformation outlets like Faux, El Rushbo the Hutt and Malkin.
They hate because that is all they have left, it is all that holds them together. They may assemble under various causes but the underlying tone they all have is hate.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@polyorchnid octopunch:
You’ll get no argument from this American, our country is going fucking crazy. Maybe this is a new version of the tongues of Babel? ;)
Oh shit, the Rapture Ready nuts are already swooning.
bemused
@JGabriel:
It’s bad enough that there are many people so stupid & mean in spirit that eagerly agree with Pat Buchanan that the undiebomber should have pain medications withheld to get him to talk, never mind that he has been talking w/o anyone pulling out his fingernails. Then there are the R profiling, torture cheerleaders that may not really buy into that kind of thinking but do it because it works on the gullible base.
Bobby Yamaha
That’s too reactive and it’s what’s wrong with political discourse now.
What we need is rhetorical jujitsu. 2010 will NOT be about health care, so let the GOP talk themselves silly about it. And while they’re doing that, Dems should be shouting non-stop about not just JOBS but MANUFACTURING.
All day, all night, 24/7/365, MANUFACTURING, MANUFACTURING, MANUFACTURING.
And then make it happen, because we cannot survive without it.
JD Rhoades
@aimai:
They’re probably convinced it made taxes higher. Every time I hear someone here sneer about Massachusetts (which is where my wife’s from), I ask, ‘so what’s so bad about it?” The answer is always ‘Oh, the taxes.”
JD Rhoades
@bemused:
You really need to watch that clip of Pat Buchanan. The more calm and adult Spencer Ackerman gets, the more angry and hysterical Buchanan becomes. Talk about shrill.
slag
Once again, Republicans demonstrate that a more entitled, more victimized group of people you never will meet. They own this place; the rest of us are just squatters.
Tomlinson
@aimai:
What seemed to shock them the most was when we took them down to Harvard Square. You maybe don’t notice this – I know I don’t – but there are a TON of houses with Virgin Mary statues on their front lawns. And there really are a lot of churches, and not weirdo churches, pretty “normal” ones. Here we are, at ground zero for gay marriage in the U.S., surrounded by Virgin Mary statues and churches. Whoa. And sure, you see gay couples, but really, they look pretty normal too, yes?
The other big deal was just meeting people at parties and noticing just how rare divorce is. I have the reverse reaction when I visit them – divorce here is not at all unknown, but it’s very rare in comparison. Hard to see a huge rip in the social fabric when you are surrounded by a higher percentage of nuclear families than you normally experience.
And we proved that we have OK barbeque. Not anything like what they have, but it’s passable (Blue Ribbon in Arlington is maybe better than that.)
It’s not like I don’t have similar reactions when I visit them, to be fair. The giant “HELL IS REAL” billboard at the airport put me on edge, but the people are great and I love visiting.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Talking about crazy, Calamity Jane’s Little Hamsters are at GOS beating the poor dead horse to death again. Cenk Uygur is over there with a diary on the Wreck List titled “Why Howard Dean & Jane Hamsher can’t be wrong”. So now he is tying Howard Dean to Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist in an attempt to justify stupidity? I can’t wait to hear what Howard Dean says.
Fucking crazy people…
JD Rhoades
@Tomlinson:
Was the plethora of Virgin Marys like that before same sex marriage became legal or is it in reaction? The most hyper-religious people I know seem to think their constant flaunting of religious symbols is some sort of act of defiance against some over-arching yet ill defined secular oppressor. Oooh, edgy.
bemused
@JD Rhoades:
These old dinosaurs, yech. I remember when Rachel Maddow, Pat & another woman were on a msnbc show & Pat, not your sweet, cuddly grampa type, told the other woman to shut up. Rachel called him on that. Yes, the old white, sexist, racist farts get shrilly cranky & petulant when everyone doesn’t bow to their superiority.
Tomlinson
@JD Rhoades:
They’ve always been there, which is why I don’t notice them.
Little shrines, all over the place.
JD Rhoades
@Tomlinson:
Damn Papists and their graven images….
(kidding)
kommrade reproductive vigor
Fxd.
You do realize their reaction is to sprout massive wood. Trolls like it rough, that’s why they’ll keep coming back for more abuse. However, being laughed at puts them off their stroke. So to speak.
Emma
J.D. Rhoades: When I first visited Boston ye many years ago, the first thing I noticed was the plethora of Catholic images everywhere. It hasn’t changed much over the years, I don’t think.
mandarama
@Bob In Pacifica:
@The Grand Panjandrum:
You know that line from My Fair Lady? “You’re to stick to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health.” Not anymore!
CalD
I continue to believe that the best possible thing that could happen to the Republican party — and probably the country for that matter — would be for about half the people who have spent the last few decades dragging the Republicans into radicalism, to either take their ball and go form their own party or otherwise splinter off and (re)join the ACP, the Libertarians and/or just go back to barricading themselves on mountain tops to wait for the end of the world.
Not to say there wouldn’t be some short-term pain associated with excising a tumor that large. And certainly they would find themselves a few pounds lighter for a while. But they’d eventually recover and be healthier for it in the long run.
The Republic of Stupidity
And now the true meaning of my chosen, online moniker becomes clear…
Corner Stone
@Bobby Yamaha:
This is not going to happen, no matter who is in charge.
scudbucket
@DougJ: everything about our public dialog is untethered to verifiable fact … I don’t know what the right description is here: “post-reality”, “post-truth”?
I remember watching the Reagan Revolution and thinking ‘I can’t support these Republicans because they simply lie about everything’. So, one question is: is the ‘untethered-ness’ new or not?
Personally, however, I agree that things are worse now, at least since Gingrich and Frist, and Rush, of course. One reason for this is the complete refutation of conservatism as a viable theory within democratic political economy. There are just no examples in modern politics (someone help me out here if this is wrong) in which the conservative policy creates more good for the greater number than the liberal policy. (And don’t bring up Reagan’s ‘tax cuts’, etc.) Now, I know that some libertarian-ish people will disagree here – on principled grounds. So to be clear: I’m saying that in America today (not as described in a book somewhere), conservatism has been utterly refuted.
Marc
@polyorchnid:
Apparently we missed a couple. Don’t worry, I’m sure the TSA is hiring.
Doug
Just chiming in from the great state of Indiana suggesting that you not be overly hasty to buy into the frame of Mitch Daniels as being too tight with government money. He balanced Indiana’s budget in no small part on the backs of local government. He raised the sales tax by 16%. He sold off our toll road for some fast cash. And he has been fairly generous with well connected recipients of privatization contracts.
And let’s not forget that he was the Bush budget director who grotesquely underestimated the cost of the Iraq War.