With respect.....
Stop the Madness!
If you didn't expect the Republican Party to act like a majority party when it became a majority party, you should have joined the Losertarians, who will never have that problem.
For ever and a day, we have pined for a governing majority. Now we are on the cusp of it. We have worked night and day, body and soul, to be able to exercise the engines of government in the House, the Senate, and the Beuracracy. The Medicare Bill was all about using a market-oriented approach to a prescription drug entitlement, attaching it to Medicare, and in so doing, stealing a significant number of elderly voters away from the Democrats.
Common Tator said it best: if you want people to do what you want, you have to convince them to support you and your policies. Would we be better off in the long run having not created this entitlement? Probably. But in order to do that (after both Presidential Candidates had promised this put-up job to the voters in 2000), you'd have to convince voters that a return to smaller government was a good thing. Hard to do with people who want their Interstate Highways maintained. Voters talk a good game about small government and deficits. But as hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, they will vote for the man who will maintain their pork.
Barry Goldwater made the mistake of believing that he could convince the American people that, in short, the New Deal was a fundamentally bad thing and we needed to take another look at Social Security. Let me tell you how well that thesis resonated with Americans:
My mother, my sister, and I lived in Sarasota, Florida, in 1964. During the Goldwater Campaign, Mom got heavily into politics. Republican politics. She was one of those postwar conservative Southern Women who didn't cotton to LBJ, but adored Jack. Mom regarded LBJ with the same appreciation that the Grand Wizard would welcome a membership application by Michael Jackson.
LBJ was not as admired in the South as his liberal hagiographers would like to believe.
She read that Bill Miller, some poor little stooge that Goldwater roped into joining his suicide pact, was coming to town to make a speech and decided to meet him at the airport. Among the folks who turned out for Miller were about a dozen old biddies from the Women's Pubbie Club, my Mom, and little old me. Oh, and a reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, as piss-poor an excuse for a newspaper in 1964 as it remains today. One time Mom mentioned to me that Miller was ripe with the smell of bourbon. She also said that the cheap little hack shook my hand. I was five, and I don't remember my hand being shaken by a pol, but Mom swore that it happened. Anyway, nobody cared that Bill Miller was in town. Why did nobody care? Because mostly everybody wanted to keep the New Deal intact.
Florida went for Lyndon Baines by a mile.
LBJ understood the secret of politics: you get rewarded by the people if you do what they want. The smart politician is the one who divines what the people want, then leads them to the getting of what they want, all the while making sure that they remember who led them to the getting.
Goldwater, among other principled conservatives, didn't have a clue. LBJ, Reagan, and the younger Bush have the clues in spades. But that is another story. In short, Bush and Frist just spanked Teddy, Hillary, Schumer, and the rest of that crowd but good, and whipped them like scalded curs at their own game. Majority parties do that. Minority parties bitch and moan about how unfair and unprincipled it all is. Guess which side ain't bitching?
Be Seeing You,
Chris