At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky tells Why the GOP Loves the Debt:
The GOP House speaker in Minnesota is quoted in the Star-Tribune today inveighing against saddling future generations with debt. I don’t know the man, so I’ll allow for the possibility that he’s sincere. But at the highest levels, the Republican Party cares nothing about the public debt. In fact, it wants more. Americans must understand this.
It is the party of debt. It is the party of deficits. It is the party of recession. It is the party of unemployment. It is the party of inequality. And it is the party of middle-class stagnation and slippage.
It is the party of all these things because it needs these conditions to exist—so that its leaders can scream “Crisis!” But they don’t desire in any meaningful way to fix the crisis. They scream about crisis because what they desire is to use the crisis as an excuse to do things to this country that the hard right has wanted to do for 30 years.
We see it all over the place. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich could have behaved more like other governors around the country who’ve won labor concessions, like New York Democrat Andrew Cuomo. But they sought to go much farther with their “emergency” bills. Why? Well, as long as there’s an economic emergency, they can just repeat “Crisis! Crisis! Crisis!” and a certain percentage of the public and the gullible and hopeful media, which refuses to believe that governmental leaders can possibly be as deceitful as these people are, will buy it.
At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:
It comes as no surprise, but today the Washington Post says that the Rubber Stamp Republican Congress is intending to make political hay of the Supreme Court Hamdan decision by painting the Democrats as weak on terrorism. Well, that's news.
Let's talk about what that really means for the Republicans. It means they are branding themselves as pro-torture. Because what the administration's insistence upon military commissions really has been all about, from the beginning, is torture. The military commissions operate outside of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and common Article 3 of the Geneva convention which preclude the use of coerced evidence in judical proceedings. ...
So what's it going to be, GOP Senators? Mr. McCain? Are you going to be among the Rubber Stamp Republicans standing up with this administration against the Uniform Code of Military Justice, against the Geneva Conventions, to codify torture? And try to smear Democrats with the "weak on terror" charge when you are putting our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan further at risk by thumbing your nose at the Geneva Conventions?
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