Before Rick Santorum was purged from Washington for his pro-life statism, the Washington Post summed up his, George Bush’s, and the GOP’s sins in an editorial titled “Big Government Conservatism.”
Back in 1987, when Mr. Reagan applied his veto to what was generally known at the time as the highway and mass transit bill, he was offended by the 152 earmarks for pet projects favored by members of Congress. But on Wednesday Mr. Bush signed a transportation bill containing no fewer than 6,371 earmarks. Each one of these, as Mr. Reagan understood but Mr. Bush apparently doesn’t, amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers’ dollars. One point of an earmark is to direct money to a project that would not receive money as a result of rational judgments based on cost-benefit analyses.
Mr. Bush, who had threatened to veto wasteful spending bills, chose instead to cave in. He did so despite the fact that in addition to a record number of earmarks the transportation bill came with a price tag that he had once called unacceptable. The bill has a declared cost of $286 billion over five years plus a concealed cost of a further $9 billion; Mr. Bush had earlier drawn a line in the sand at $256 billion, then drawn another line at $284 billion. Asked to explain the president’s capitulation, a White House spokesman pleaded that at least this law would be less costly than the 2003 Medicare reform. This is a classic case of defining deviancy down.
This is why I do not support Rick Santorum. I do not want a co-conspirator to government largess premised on the rhetoric of compassionate or big government conservatism being rewarded.
via www.redstate.com
Erick Erickson gets it exactly right. His beef with Rick Santorum (who currently seems to be surging in the Iowa polls--into a virtual tie with Gingrich for 3rd place behind Romney and Paul) is the same beef, though that many of us in the libertarian movement have against many/most of the so-called conservatives out there. We reject the notion that government power is o.k. if it is aimed at upholding "conservative" principles, or its intentions are good.
