Have You Seen The Little Piggies?

I don't know if it's all the tweetering or whatever, but I do see a lot of folks pissed off over the "stimulus" bill.

Oh, hell, let's not call it a stimulus bill, it's just Christmas for Democrats. (Hey, they won, right? That means they get to do whatever they want!)

But let us also not forget that this little moment at the trough which--worst case scenario, could be Obama's FDR to W's Hoover, giving us fourteen years of really bad times instead of six years of moderately bad times--was brought to you by the Republicans.

Starting with GHWB and culminating with W and his what-me-veto? attitude to Congress, the Reps sold out Reagan and the Contract with America, wasting the political capital and goodwill those two mini-revolutions had garnered.

In fairness, I saw grass-roots Reps and bloggers like Malkin and Ace criticize the spendthrift Congress and W at the time, but the point is, Reps should treat government expansion like kryptonite. Limiting the power of government requires only that you have the forethought to realize that the other side will soon be weilding that power.

Now that the Dems are in power, what they should be doing is looking to limit government power in civil rights areas: House cleaning at the DHS, amendments to the Patriot act, all that stuff they said they were going to do. They would do well to do relax the War on Drugs, too, given the way they bitched about that in the '80s but that Clinton never seemed to be able to get around to cutting down on.

Bonus: you can cut down on all those areas and then you have more money to redistribute!

It would also make sense that the Dems, the self-proclaimed voice of the working poor and middle class, would severely curb illegal immigration, which really hurts those two groups and the unions.

They won't, of course. You know that joke--may have originated with "The Simpsons" but it feels a lot older--about "backing a dump truck full of money into my driveway"? Our elections basically do that to the winning party.

Reps win when they have a Reagan or a Gingrich enforcing discipline. If the discipline is in, they're unbeatable. (Which makes the whole McCain for President thing a tragic joke.)

Obama is one of those figures--he can get what he wants--but the Dems seem to get elected by promising rainbows and ponies. The main concern, however, is that rainbows and ponies have already been promised, and we're at the point where paying for them has become a serious issue.

More than a serious issue: An economy crippling, nation buckling, can't-be-avoided-much-longer disaster.

I'm fairly confident that our Congress will avoid it for as long as they can.