The Medicine Conservatives Can't Swallow

[coda]

It worth reading for his posting of links to different RW reactions.

Hilarious.

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The Medicine Conservatives Can't Swallow

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; 9:04 AM

I've never seen anything quite like it.

One party -- the Republicans -- pushing through a bill that its core constituency can't stand.


Sure, the opportunity to brag about giving seniors a big fat prescription drug benefit is awfully tempting. But the Medicare measure that is expected to pass the Senate today is such a budget-buster that it has all but wiped out the GOP's claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility.

Many conservatives are appalled, and making their disgust clear.

Bill Clinton's signing of the '96 welfare reform bill might come close, in that many Democratic liberals saw it as a sellout but were glad to steal a hot-button issue from the opposition. A prescription drug benefit could do that for the Republicans -- with the caveat that it doesn't take effect until 2006 and many recipients may find the benefit inadequate.

If the bill breaks the fragile program's bank, as many believe it will, the Republicans will have no one to blame, since they control both houses of Congress as well as the White House. But rarely has a political party rammed through a measure -- which took a three-hour, middle-of-the-night House roll call on Saturday -- that was so at odds with its vision of itself (as the champions of smaller government). And all of it blessed by George W. Bush. (He fared less well on the pork-laden energy bill, which is now toast.) The Democratic candidates had a fine old time blasting the bill at yesterday's Tom Brokaw debate as the end of Medicare As We Know It. But more interesting to me, from a media point of view, is all the commentators on the right who are holding their nose about the bill.

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Kurtz's piece is definitely worth reading mainly for its many comments he's added from the right wing and right wing publications. Here's a couple of lines Kurtz had from Andrew Sullivan.


Andrew Sullivan groans about both parties, starting with the Democrats:

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/

"Their paleo response to the Medicare bill is truly depressing. There are many reasons to oppose this bill -- most importantly that it will destroy the remaining threads of fiscal hope. But to oppose even experimentation with cost-cutting reforms reveals a party completely bankrupt of new ideas. Then to watch the Dems rake in the pork on the Hooters bill reminds you again of all the reasons you don't trust Democrats with the national government.

"But . . . and it's a big but . . . the Republicans' victories are at the price of something else, as Joe Klein points out. The GOP has now no credibility as a party of fiscal discipline or small government. It's just another tool of special interests -- as beholden to them as the Dems are to theirs. Its pork barrel excesses may now be worse than the Dems, and the president seems completely unable or unwilling to restrain them."




more....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12826-2003Nov25.html