Now you want to raise taxes? Now, with after scores of people hurt and several killed, now it's ok to acknowledge that government isn't the devil, that taxes aren't evil?
Now it's time to raise taxes? Now that your political future is in trouble. Now that your tax-hating buddies are coming to town in a year and they will be a gaping gap illustrating the failure of your ideology, now it's time to work together?
Not last year, when legislators sent you a bill with a modest five cent increase in the gas tax, the first in 20 years? After all, as you said, DFLers "have simply been obsessed" with a gas tax. Those crazy liberals, always obsessed with keeping citizens alive, obsessed with ensuring our infrastructure will meet the demands of a growing population.
But now your spokesman says it’s ok to break the pledge in light of "extraordinary circumstances."
These extraordinary circumstances your spokesman refers to, that’s what it takes to invest in our state? The death and injury of scores and the loss of a critical piece of infrastructure? Or is it just extraordinary that your Vice Presidential aspirations may have collapsed moments after the bridge?
Earlier this year you called a gas tax increase "an unnecessary and onerous burden." Would that burden be more or less onerous than that borne by Julia Anne Blackhawk’s two children who will now grow up motherless? Or perhaps since Jessica Engebretsen is 18 her mother is unnecessary? Did Patrick Holmes children really need to learn to fish with their dad?
In 2005 you asked "how dumb can they be?"referring to DFLers who sent you another gas tax increase that you vetoed. How dumb indeed. Of course back then, your fealty to the Taxpayers League scored you huge points with Republicans nationally.
It’s only now that a visible crisis puts your career at risk, much as you’ve put Minnesotans at risk, that you’re willing to "come together and work as aggressively as we can to address these issues."
Shame on you.