Political Irony

One of my favorite political blogs, Eclectablog, points out an interesting statistic:

When Bill Clinton left office and George W Bush was sworn in, the number of people without health insurance in the US stood at 38.4 million (a number which would have been zero if the Clintons had succeeded in passing single-payer health insurance). By the time Bush left office that number was 46.3 million, an increase of 20.6%, or nearly 8 million people. Most of this was due to Dubya’s Great Recession causing people to lose their jobs, and thus their health insurance.

But using numbers from a new Gallup Survey, between 10 to 11 million Americans gained health insurance in just the first half of 2014. And this includes only people who now receive health insurance for the first time.

That’s right. It took only 6 months for Obamacare to (more than) reverse the health insurance disaster from Dubya’s eight years in office.

So of course the GOP wants to take this away from us.

While it is probably way too early to make a definitive assessment, it has been six months since marijuana became legal in Colorado, and so far all the signs are looking good:

• Overall crime has dropped 10% from this time a year ago, and violent crime has dropped 5.2%.
• In the first four months, the state received over $10 million in tax revenue from retail sales.
• In addition, the state estimates it will save $12-40 million over the first year just by ending arrests for possession.
• Unemployment has dropped because of new jobs created.
• Polls show that a majority of the state residents think making marijuana legal was a good thing.

Libertarians should be rejoicing. Marijuana became legal and the sky didn’t fall. I expect that other states will follow suit, albeit slowly.

It looks like Erick Erickson, the founder of the website RedState.com, doesn’t feel particularly Red (as in Republican) right now. In an editorial published Wednesday, he says:

Having been an elected Republican and someone who routinely takes the position of supporting conservatives in primaries and Republicans in general elections, the Mississippi race does crystalize for me the desires of many to start a third party. In essence, tea party activists are the RINOs. A Republican Party campaigning on making the Senate “conservative,” used liberal Democrats to preserve an incumbent Republican and defeat a conservative. The actual conservatives are the outsiders with the GOP establishment doing all it could to preserve its power at the expense of its principles.

The problem for those who call themselves Republicans is that it is harder and harder to say exactly what a Republican is these days. The great lesson from Mississippi is that Republican means, more or less, that if elected the party will reward its major donors, who are just different than the Democrats’ major donors. Policy differences are about different donors, not an actual agenda to shift the country in a different direction.

The Republicans have become the party of lobbyists, most of whom were on twitter celebrating their purchase.

Mississippi is a crystalizing election in that sense. Cochran is, for all intents and purposes, a marionette. His strings are pulled by staffers and lobbyists. They drop him onto the stage of the Senate and pull up a string to raise his hand. These puppeteers are so invested in keeping their gravy train going that they will, while claiming to be Republicans, flood a Republican primary with Obama voters to ensure their gravy train continues.

There’s more…

But to me, it sounds like Erickson is bemoaning the same problem that bothers many liberals — that there is just too much damn money in politics. So would he consider teaming up with progressives who want campaign finance reform? That would be an interesting partnership.

In the end, Erickson concludes:

I’m just not sure what the Republican Party really stands for any more other than telling Obama no and telling our own corporate interests yes. That’s not much of a platform.

© Matt Bors

As Pogo would say, “We have met the enemy, and they are us!”

Or is this just another example of the old adage that if you go in opposite directions on the political spectrum, you will eventually meet yourself?

© Signe Wilkinson

Ironically, Dick Cheney wrote that editorial with his daughter Liz, whose birth conveniently provided him with a draft deferral. Isn’t it time?

Then we will see if he is greeted as a liberator!

UPDATE: Civil war seems to be breaking out in the Republican party. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said yesterday that people like Dick Cheney who blame the president for the current violence should take a look in the mirror. Paul says we need to ask the people who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq “Were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? Was the war won in 2005, when many of those people said it was won?”

In turn, Cheney strikes back: “Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist. He doesn’t believe we ought to be involved in that part of the world. That didn’t work in the 1930s, it sure as heck won’t work in the aftermath of 9/11, when 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters came all the way from Afghanistan and killed 3,000 of our citizens.”

Cheney tries to deflect criticism of his handling of Iraq when he was vice president by saying “I was a strong supporter then of going into Iraq, I’m a strong supporter now. Everybody knows what my position is. There’s nothing to be argued about there. But if we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.”

Personally, I think it is he who is stuck in the past, bringing up 9/11 as a justification for stupid wars, when there was absolutely no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. Not to mention how his administration bungled 9/11 itself.