Mankato Free Press

The Free Press

—"The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” Alan Greenspan wrote in his new book. “They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

Greenspan, 81, perhaps can remember a time when the GOP had principles to compromise (excluding Norm Coleman, of course, a politician of no fixed principles).

He can’t be referring to the party of Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon and his plumbers, or the racist Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan. Reagan then ran the most corrupt administration in history: 138 Reagan administration officials were investigated, indicted, or convicted, according to political historian Richard Reeves.

It was also the Reagan Mafiosi, led by Grover Norquist types, who happened upon the perfect crime: Steal from future generations who can’t protest. The principle of balanced budgets became “Deficits don’t matter, to my chagrin,” said Greenspan. The result is today’s dead-beat Republican Party that proudly recites Norquist’s pledge not to pay their bills.

Junior Bush, elected with the help of the slash-and-burn politics pioneered by Atwater, Gingrich and Rove, continued Reagan’s free-lunch, borrow-and-spend policies to increase the national debt by $3 trillion.

Small government? According to the Congressional Budget office, Bush grew the federal government three times faster than Clinton, all of it on borrowed money — $248 billion last year alone.

Honest government? DeLay’s shakedown operation was as corrupt as any in modern history and helped finance the Republican Congress that endorsed Bush’s lies about Iraq.

Respect for the law? The secretive, deceptive Bush administration has systematically undermined the Constitution in order to concentrate power in the White House, revealing its only true principle: power at all cost.

Tom Maertens
Mankato