VA Scandal Is Living Study on Big Government Bureaucracies

"For the lesson of the V.H.A.'s success story -- that a government agency can deliver better care at lower cost than the private sector -- runs completely counter to the pro-privatization, anti-government conventional wisdom that dominates today's Washington."- Paul Krugman, liberal economist, idiot.

Sometimes I wonder if the conservative/ libertarians are actually a minority in the Republican Party. Seriously, what is it that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner really believe in? Is winning elections, beating the Democrats, all they really care about? Do they even have a philosophy?

Apparently they do not, and just in case they do, that philosophy surely isn't small government conservatism, because if it were, if they really understood that the administrative state was out of control and had become the "fourth branch of government", if they really understood that government bureaucracies are always less efficient and effective than the private sector, if they really believed that, then they would stop with the politics of associating the VA scandal with Democrats, and instead focus on the fact that the VA is socialized medicine in it's purest form and is therefore evidence that socialized medicine does not work too well.

You see, when President Obama and the Democrats point out that the VA has always been a disaster, instead of stating that he made it worse, the GOP should agree. Yes that's right. Instead of going for the short term political gain, they should be pointing out that he is correct, that regardless of who runs the government agency, a government agency can never deliver anything, especially something as important as health care, as good and as efficient as the private sector. If anything should kill Obamacare and the idea for single payer, it should be the VA scandal.

But the Republicans in Washington do not seem to think this way. No, they are too worried about winning their next election. It's almost as if the conservative philosophy is a second language to them.

The irony of all of this is that they actually have it wrong. Just as being a good teammate in a team sport leads to great individual accomplishment, thinking big picture/long term, in this instance, will actually benefit them in the short term.They think they are acting in a way that will help them win in November, but they could not be more wrong. This is a majority conservative country just waiting for true conservatism, and when it does not appear, conservatives stay home.

I guess it's hard to think like a conservative though, when you are not one.

A Rare Criticism of Dr. Sowell

In all my years blogging at numerous websites, I have never, not once, criticized anything written by Professor Thomas Sowell. To a libertarian conservative, Sowell is a rock star. But his latest column on Ted Cruz could not be anymore wrong, not just wrong about Cruz, but wrong about the Republican Party, wrong about everything. It almost broke my heart to read it, and reading Ben Howe's (Red State) commentary on Sowell's article was even more painful, not because Howe was incorrect or unfair in his critiscism, but because he was right. Sowell, unbelievably made establishment/ ruling class Republican arguments. Shockingly to me, Dr Sowell sounded like one of "them", the GOP corporatists, the neo-statists, the ruling class.

Sowell wrote:

The most charitable interpretation of Ted Cruz and his supporters is that they are willing to see the Republican party weakened in the short run, in hopes that they will be able to take it over in the long run, and set it on a different path as a more purified conservative party. 

I'm not even going to touch the ridiculousness of what he wrote after that, but I do want to tackle the notion of purity in the Republican Party. It's not about purity, really. It's about the basics, and the ruling class GOP doesn't even come close.

Conservatives are often reminded of O'Donnell in Delaware and Murdock in Indiana. But you know, I welcome that conversation. The point is, if Lugar and Castle were nominated, and both of them went on to win, what would we have won? Seriously, are liberal Republicans better than liberal Democrats? In the Bush administration, we had the Presidency and both houses of Congress, and did the deficit go down? No, it went up like crazy, record deficits at the time. And you tell me all we need to do is elect more Republicans? What about the size of government under Bush, with the Medicare entitlement and the expansion of the administrative state? And you are still trying to tell me that we need to be quiet and focus on trying to "win", that we won't be able to accomplish anything until the GOP takes back the Senate? Are you serious? Are you on dope or something? Has it affected your short term memory?

Don't forget folks, the Tea Party movement did not begin as a reaction to Obama. The Tea Party movement came about because of Bush, and things like TARP, and the auto bailout.

We're going off the cliff folks, and if we hit that valley in ten seconds or ten minutes, does it really matter? I'm sorry, but these establishment Republicans need to be exposed, and if we lose an election here and there, so what? Lugar is vocally and monetarily supporting Democrats now, and Charlie Crist, not only is he a Democrat these days, but he spoke at Barack Obama's 2012 convention. And you tell me, we just need to elect more Republicans? Wrong answer my friend. We need to elect conservatives, and Republicans that are not conservative, well they need to be revealed.