BCT Editorial – 8/9/06

This page was last updated on August 12, 2006.

Name game; Editorial; Beaver County Times; August 9, 2006.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“No matter what they say, today’s GOP leaders aren’t conservative

“Any claim modern-day Republicans had to being conservatives in the traditional (and best) sense of the word has long been put to rest.”

[RWC] This is news to the Times? Conservatives have been pointing this out for a long time.

“Since President Bush has been in office, and working in conjunction with the GOP-controlled Congress, our nation has experienced the largest expansion of the welfare state in the last 40 years (the Medicare prescription drug plan); the massive intrusion of the federal government into public education, a traditional state-local matter (The No Child Left Behind Act); the usurpation of basic civil liberties (The Patriot Act); a gross expansion of executive power based on the president’s position as commander-in-chief (in the guise of fighting a war on terrorism); an executive branch that puts itself above the law (in the form of signing statements in which the president says he has no intention of following the laws he signs); runaway deficit spending and rampant borrowing.”

[RWC] This paragraph is a joke.

Times editorials advocate “welfare state” programs at every turn, yet it wants us to believe otherwise. The Medicare drug plan is an example. While editorials always correctly hold this up as an example of fiscal irresponsibility, those same editorials also lobby for a taxpayer-funded national healthcare system that would include prescription drugs for everyone. Do the editorial authors believe we’re so stupid we don’t see this?

“[P]ublic education [is] a traditional state-local matter?” Where has the Times been since 1965 when the Democrat Congress and president enacted the Elementary and Secondary Education Act? The NCLBA is only the most recent update.

Regarding the Patriot Act, why did Democrats vote for it if it’s so evil? Remember, 98% of the Senate voted for the Patriot Act as did 83% of the House, including 69% of Democrats.

The signing statement comment is a gross distortion bordering on a lie. The Boston Globe quoted a senior administration official as saying, “Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, (but) he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case. We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it’s possible that they will.”

“And they want more power to flow into their hands.

“The Washington Post reports a provision in the House-passed defense authorization bill would expand the president’s authority to take over National Guard troops in case of national disaster or homeland security.”

[RWC] This is a hoot. I don’t know the details of the bill, but Democrats jumped all over President Bush for not federalizing the National Guard for Hurricane Katrina despite the fact he did not have the authority. Now that President Bush allegedly wants to have the power, liberals like the Times portray him as power mad. What a joke!

“Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the Republican who is chairman of the National Governors Association, said the proposal is symptomatic of a larger federal effort to make states no more than ‘satellites of the national government.’

“To make matters worse, this was a sneak attack on the states. The Post reports the provision was tucked into the House version of the defense bill without the states being notified.

“What Americans are seeing is big-government, power-hungry nationalists assigning federalism, which is at the very core of our Constitution, to the dustbin of history.

“True conservatives had better start to fight back, not only to rescue their good name from these usurpers, but for the good of the nation as well.”

[RWC] Is this editorial serious? The Times fights conservative principles tooth and nail.

I can only assume this editorial is targeted at conservatives. The objective is to get conservatives to “fight back” at Rockefeller Republicans by voting for Democrats or by not voting at all. If you think this editorial is trying to encourage conservatives to get behind true conservative Republicans “to rescue their good name,” you haven’t been paying attention to Times editorials.

I wonder if the author realizes what he did with this editorial. After all, he listed all these “unconservative” actions and told us they represented bad policy. The problem for the author is, these are all actions generally supported by liberals when liberals are in power.