Once again, American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky gets it right:
I could make this into another column about this administration’s mendacity…But there’s another argument about this administration, and about the Republican Party in general, that needs to be made….The Republicans are total incompetents.
Republicans, at least since the 1980 election, have gotten lots of mileage out of billing themselves as the party of competence. They knew how to deal with the Russkies. They understood a budget. They knew how to crack down on the crooks and hoodlums. They understood the bottom line, and they knew what was right for America. The Democrats, meanwhile, were supposedly more interested in their dainty little social-engineering schemes than in success. Lots of people bought all of this, and of course there was a little bit of truth to it — then. But the labels stuck hard. Democrats still have to take dramatic steps to prove their competence while Republicans are presumed — by the mainstream media, anyway — to possess it until they demonstrate otherwise.
Well, guess what? They’ve demonstrated otherwise. No one — no one — can name a single front on which today’s Republicans have shown even the simplest competence. They don’t know how to manage an economy. They sure don’t know how to balance a budget. They have no idea how to create jobs (though they do have a pretty strong sense of how to make them disappear). Their domestic-security measures have consisted of the usual emphasis on show over substance, first stealing a Democratic idea (the Department of Homeland Security) and then underfunding the result in some crucial respects — a mistake for which I pray we never pay a price….And now, it turns out, they don’t know how to do the one thing they’ve spent 50 years convincing Americans that they and only they know how to do: fight a war.
Yes, those are fighting words, and I’m sure likely to be dismissed as shrill partisan invective by some. But it’s hard to deny that the parties have flip-flopped on a lot. It’s odd to see the Republicans become the one with blurry, dreamy idealistic visions for remaking the world and the Dems hard-nosed foreign policy realists. Or notice that the Democrats are doing their best to hold up tradition in balance in our governance - whether through legislative redisticting or a politically-neutral civil service - while the Republicans are pulling an FDR and trying to rig the system in their favor. And it’s odd to see the Republicans so wedded to the ideology that any tax cut is good that they’re backing themselves into a corner of fiscal profligacy.
None of this excuse the Democrats faults, or should keep them from attempting to become more competent. Trade policy, for instance, seems an area in which the Democrats are backsliding - something I’ll take up in the next post. This website, in fact, is in large part dedicated to the belief that the left in general would do better to be more pragmatic and realist in its approach, even if its aims differ from the center or right.
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