Tom Coburn on the GOP Meltdown
Writing by abuhatem on Tuesday, 27 of May , 2008 at 3:13 pm
Good for Tom Coburn, who’s column today in the Wall Street Journal explains why the GOP are going to lose big this election and how the Republicans have transformed themselves into a liberal left-wing party. Coburn does not mention the war in Iraq, which was the biggest of all big government programs, but has said before that he thinks it was “probably a mistake to invade Iraq.”
Coburn’s message of limited government makes Donald Devine’s more traditional conservative American Conservative Union rate him as the most conservative senator in the U.S. Senate. Devine opposed the Iraq war, and the patriot act, so this is notable. Coburn voted for Patriot Act renewal, but he did voice his opposition to many parts of the bill on MSNBC’s Meet the Press saying:
I think we need to be very careful with the Patriot Act. We should not ever give up freedom on the basis of fear, and any freedom that we give up should be limited in time and limited in scope. And so therefore I believe the Patriot Act across all levels should be sunsetted just as I believe every other law we passed in terms of giving the government new powers or new programs should be sunsetted so that we come back and have to make a decision about it. The Patriot Act coming out of the House has no sunset provisions. And I believe it’s important for Americans’ rights that we sunset those and look at them again.
As a medical doctor, Coburn has been the leading senator opposing the oppressive nationalization of healthcare which both Obama and Clinton support.
Thus Coburn is no perfect slate traditional conservative, but his anti-spending, anti-socialized medicine, pro-life, and pro-civil liberties message is at least a start. If only he would go against the Iraq war.
Coburn says in the WSJ today about the GOP meltdown:
Unfortunately, too many in our party are not yet ready to return to the path of limited government. Instead, we are being told our message must be deficient because, after all, we should be winning in certain areas just by being Republicans. Yet being a Republican isn’t good enough anymore. Voters are tired of buying a GOP package and finding a big-government liberal agenda inside. What we need is not new advertising, but truth in advertising…
The fruit of these efforts is not the hoped-for Republican governing majority, but the real prospect of a filibuster-proof Democrat majority in 2009. While the K Street Project decimated our brand as the party of reform and limited government, compassionate conservatism convinced the American people to elect the party that was truly skilled at activist government: the Democrats.
Coburn opposes “compassionate conservatism” which was just George W. Bush’s phrase with the esoteric meaning of “spreading oppressive dependency on government.” Instead Coburn affirms the fallacy of welfare, using an argument that mirrors that of traditional anti-war conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, saying:
Compassionate conservatism’s next step – its implicit claim that charity or compassion translates into a particular style of activist government involving massive spending increases and entitlement expansion – was its undoing. Common sense and the Scriptures show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor’s possessions. Spending other people’s money is not compassionate.
At the end of the column though, Coburn endorses a McCain presidency as a way out of this mess. The same left-wing John McCain who supported liberal programs such as no child left behind, expanding medicare, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, and voted against the Bush taxcuts twice.
John McCain is the epitome of Coburn’s arguments of where the GOP has gone wrong, he is the classic example of a liberal republican like 8-years under the left-wing president George W. Bush.
Category: American Politics
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