From My Side

Reading a Doc Zero column on a lazy Saturday morning is kind of like sex or a Denzel Washington movie: it's never really bad. He tends to write in the first-person plural when referring to this side of the great partisan rift, which a tad presumptuous, but effective. This particular column refers to how the GOP can get its act together:

Republican candidates must recognize the Obama disaster as a unique opportunity to explain the fundamental flaws in the statist model our nation has pursued for generations. Obama was not a transformational figure. He merely jumped liberalism ahead by a few election cycles, and demonstrated the final, fatal absurdity of its philosophy. Republicans should take this unique opportunity to attack the horrendously mistaken, supposedly invulnerable assumptions which have guided the devolution of our federal government since the New Deal. Obama was the inevitable product of machinery that has been groaning and clanking in the American basement for decades. We don’t want Republicans to tell us how they could deliver the nanny state for a bit less money than Obama wanted to spend. We don’t want to hear the 2008 Democrats portrayed as well-meaning reformers who just over-reached a little bit, or handled the marketing effort for their programs badly. We need leaders with the courage to head down into the basement with sledgehammers, and start knocking Roosevelt and Johnson’s nightmare machine to pieces. It’s not enough to just roll the current madness back a little, then let the whole tragedy play itself out again, with our children as the captive audience.

The steady drumbeat of Democrats demonizing their opponents and even the President deciding who and who isn't an "American" is the sound of their backs hitting the wall, and there will need to be room for alternatives in 2010. But I'm a bit less optimistic on the Republicans than Dr. Zero, because like all politicians, they make false promises about "fixing the economy" with "tax cuts for small businesses" at the expense of our national security as our debt piles up. I'm waiting for the politician to tell the American people that the recession happened because America is consuming more than it is producing and the recession is a result of market-forces correcting this discrepancy. But then again I hear Peter Schiff is running for Senate in Connecticut.