Posted on 12/09/2003 7:41:48 AM PST by RogerFGay
What have Republicans done for us lately?December 9, 2003
by Roger F. Gay
The pages of MensNewsDaily.com have recently displayed the most common characteristic of American election year politics - partisan bickering at the expense of focus on issues.
MND has never hidden its conservative tendencies; a much needed balance to the increasingly irrational and often extreme leftist bias of the old media. MND writers and readers alike express strong support for adherence to constitutional principles and a strong aversion to arbitrary government control through policies based on group prejudice.
For at least a fleeting moment in our history, the lines of ideology and partisanship seemed to come together.
The Democrat Party had a Soviet (or Nazi, take your pick, they both worked the same way) approach to government, playing one group against another and promising money and power over others to groups they chose to be on their side. (They were racists when the KKK was powerful and began playing more sides in the 1960s when other movements threatened the old order.) They have systematically eroded individual rights until tens of millions of Americans now feel the crescendo; many thousands of emotionally loaded, psychologically motivated bureaucrats with the power to arbitrarily control our lives by force and intimidation, with police entering our homes without just cause dragging us away at gun point.
The rational choice, at least for a short while, was the Republican Party; the party of Lincoln, the party of limited government, the Grand Old Party. The last Republican president of that description was Gerald Ford. But even he - while noting that creation of a U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement - took the federal government too far into domestic relations, signed the bill that created it. At least he publicly acknowledged that it was wrong and in fact promised to suggest legislation to correct it.
The creation of the office was introduced as an amendment to more popular social services legislation by Democrat Senator Russell Long, whose family was strongly associated with racist neo-nazi organizations and organized crime. There were no compelling facts or scientific logic to his suggestions, just rants about "deadbeats" costing taxpayers money. If much of the anti-father rhetoric he threw around had been true, his core supporters would have opposed him; since most of them would have been part of group he attacked. At that time however, especially given the Long family's reputation, the association he made between "deadbeats" and welfare suggested an attack on racial minorities. Long's proposals also hung on the coat tails of an international leftist movement, expressed through a Hague Convention manifesto.
The bill was signed during an election year, just as most bills of this sort are; as they are aimed at spending and political favors with the hope of getting votes in return. Ford lost the election and no corrective legislation was suggested. Not much happened on this front during the Carter years. He didn't expand the program. He didn't fix the problem. The program was not in the public interest, but also not in the political interests of Jimmy Carter or Democrats to oppose. Its billion dollar a year budget would be missed by the states.
A revolution was about to occur and not many people would see just how important it was. Ronald Reagan, who had introduced so-called "no-fault" divorce to the United States as governor of California, first appeared before Congress in support of a federal child support enforcement program in 1974; along with representatives of what is now widely acknowledged as a leftist political extremist group, NOW. When the Reagan administration began suggesting dramatic increases in spending on child support enforcement in the 1980s, the Republican Party lost interest in limited government and buried its understanding of constitutional principles.
The new philosophical divide is an ACLU / NOW variety anti-religious left-wing cultism verses the Republican's pompous pseudo-religious right-wing cultism. The difference in the details of their rhetoric depends not on their real politics, but on the core groups each party intends to capture to win elections. In the end, both parties support the same domestic policy agenda apart from minor differences here and there and some exaggerated drama during election campaigns. The two party system is not really alive and well. Judged on the basis of how politics effects the huddled masses, we have a one party system with competing factions. Neither party remembers what a "free country" is supposed to be like. Corruption is rampant. The closest they ever come to an expression of ideological difference is a Marxist battle between "big business" capitalism and the "working class" in which both parties actually make promises to both sides.
For the years since 1975, Russell Long's agenda has held a prominent place in the official Democrat Party Platform and did not find its way into the official Republican Platform until the so-called "Contract With America." The radical changes that have taken place in America enjoyed bipartisan support since the time of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
Rather than moving in the direction promised by Gerald Ford, president Bush promised to "build on what we already have." His HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson enacted plagiarized Soviet family policy as governor of Wisconsin, and helped promote it as the national model for welfare reform. The assistant secretary for children and families Wade Horn is a published anti-father bigot who has spent years trying to recruit churches and charities into the current web of corruption. Republicans have enjoyed a majority in both houses of Congress as well as holding the presidency without any suggestion that problems in family policy will be fixed. The two parties are pursuing the same agenda, working to incorporate different segments of society.
This is not the appropriate time for honest people who are sincerely interested in family policy to join the partisan game. To do so leaves us with nothing but an illusion that we have supported the lesser of two evils. It is time to ask, what have the parties done for me lately? Evil is not what we want and we should not give our support without concrete change.
Roger F. Gay is a professional analyst and director of Project for the Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology. Other articles by Roger F. Gay can be found at Fathering Magazine and the MND archive.
Make that foreign policy agenda too, including trade and Iraq which is just a continuation of Clinton. Bush has just extended it by making China a favored trade nation and sending troops to Iraq.
If jobs don't increase, troop deaths continue in Iraq and the alert flag is still raised here, people could jump to Dean (or?) as the lesser of two evils. Since choosing the lesser is the only game in town.
The two party system, privacy, etc were not defined and much was left to interpretation. It may very well be devoured by definitions and interpratations.
It's not what the founders had in mind.
Again, the Constitution, to a large degree, is whatever at least five Justices (a majority) interpret it to be at any given time, based on their ideology, and regardless of what the Founders intended or what the citizens expect.
Are you still living in Sweden? What is President Bush supposed to do for people in Sweden?
Amazing. Somebody gets it.
I suppose you could look at it that way. It is no longer what it was and will change over time. People in power can not resist the urge to change it, for better or worse.
I always suspected we were really living in a Matrix.
Yes, a matrix or simulacron...or a simulated matrix or simulacron.
Disassociation from politics is your solution. It is the solution of all who would rather have philisophical purity rather than results. If you work, and fight, and struggle and at the end of the day have 1/10th of a loaf of bread, you would still have more of the loaf than those who remain on the sidelines scoffing at those who struggle and remain hungry in their self-righteousness.
No one who is serious, sane, and adult would assume that they can get everything they want even over decades of work in our system. That is precisely why our system works. If you want overnight change, examine the Italian political system. They have one group or another proclaiming victory every several years only to be handed crushing defeat in the next few cycles. All they work for is then destroyed and they must start all over.
Incrementalism is the hallmark of American politics and why, if conservatives will adapt a long term vision that supercedes short term expectation, we will ultimately triumph with a set of policies that cannot be torn down by the next Bill Clinton. FDR did this and even Reagan was able to do little more than dent his structure of Socialism. It will take many Reagans and Bushes to tear it down.
Or, alternately, one internet pundit who will refuse to run because it might taint his philisophic purity.
Incrementalism is the hallmark of American politics
Precisely because it is the only way to effectively undermine those pesky Constitutional restraints...
It's just the political walking thing: left foot takes a step, right foot takes a step, left foot takes a step, right foot takes a step ...People get too interested in which foot is in front to notice which direction they are both going.
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