Forgive me if this post seems trollish, I'm posting it as an argument for smaller government more than anything else. This article could apply to Republican conservatives in some respects, though probably less so than Democratic liberals. I would've been a little less hostile writing this, but I feel it has a point. I've bold faced the part I feel is important.
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Liberals deserve what they get By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, November 7, 2004
Someone check if E.J. Dionne is still alive.
The Washington Post columnist was on NPR's "Some Things Considered" Wednesday night already sounding suicidal about the reign of conservative terror he fears is coming in President Bush's second term.
Voicing the concerns of millions of distraught liberals, Dionne worried that President Bush - a partisan ideologue he says deliberately ran a mean and divisive campaign that has cynically polarized the country - is going to claim a policy mandate despite his slim 51 percent victory over John Kerry.
Dionne didn't break down in tears or anything. But he was whining that the president had cynically exploited moral and cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage to win the votes of millions of nutballs on the Christian and NASCAR right.
Now, Dionne worried, with the help of an even more dangerously Republican Congress, we're all going to get things like Social Security privatization shoved down our throats!
And somebody call Kofi Annan! President Bush thinks he has the divine right to nominate any new Supreme Court justice he likes - even strict constitutionalists!
Too bad, E.J. You and your liberal pals deserve every right-wing Republican nightmare you get.
Welcome to the downside of the Big Government world you've created and been propagandizing for since 1932. This is what happens when your side keeps losing elections: the other tribe gets to pass laws they like and you are forced to follow them.Tuesday's results caused me no particular heartache or joy, though I admit I always like to see the elite media suffer when the good citizens of Flyover Country reject the liberal political and cultural ideas they hold so dear.
I was torn about whom to root for. I believed Bush deserved to be punished for Iraq, but I didn't think 290 million innocent Americans should have been sentenced to four years of President and Mrs. Kerry.
Unlike Dionne, however, "Bush II the Sequel" doesn't worry me much. I figure our quasi-conservative president has already done his worst damage at home and overseas. Without having to get elected again, he might actually be able to honor his rhetoric about wanting to cut the size and scope of government.
Meanwhile, instead of trying to guilt-trip Bush into becoming more moderate or compromising with congressional Democrats, pundits like Dionne should be hiding in shame for having supported a New Deal Neanderthal like Kerry.
Kerry, by the way, is the immoderate one, not Bush. Kerry is a welfare-state-adoring zombie whose political brain was frozen in 1969. Watching his boring campaign was like watching a nine-month-long director's cut of "Night of the Living Liberal."
And let's get real. President Bush is hardly Barry Goldwater reborn. He needs to become less compromising with Democrats, not more. He's already too comfortable with the Big Nanny state, which is why Republicans who really still believe in individual freedom, limited government and laissez faire economics - all 145 of them - are unhappy with his first term.
In any case, don't blame me for the next four years. Along with 0.3 percent of my freedom-loving countrymen, I voted for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate. He finished fourth with a rousing 395,711 votes, which should tell Dionne and grieving liberals everywhere how silly they are to worry about the longevity of their precious welfare state."