Phony Republican clap-trap by Jay Ambrose

Jay Ambrose is one of those ultra-conservative pundits who dresses up his nonsense with scholar-like verbiage. He used to work for Scripps Howard Newspapers and now is a columnist in Colorado.

In an article titled "GOP not conservative enough," he presents a pile of noxious and notorious clap-trap about Bush and the failed Bush policies. For example, Ambrose says that Bush did not lie us into a war with Iraq. How do we know that? Well, because "the claims he made about weapons of mass destruction were made earlier by President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, by liberal senators during debate on the war resolution and by the best intelligence agencies in the world."

There are so many falsehoods in that statement it's hard to know where to begin. What does Bill Clinton have to do with Bush's claim of WMDs in 2003? Not a thing. The two are unrelated. What Bill Clinton said or did not say prior to Bush's stolen election in 2000 is totally irrelevant to Bush's flat-out falsehoods leading up to his illegal invasion in the spring of 2003.

I will grant you that some so-called "liberal" senators, wanting desperately to believe that their president would not out-and-out lie to them, accepted the nonsense about WMD's.

But the United Nation's team found nothing. No WMDs. And said so, again and again. Our intelligence agencies, far from supporting Bush's lies, actually denied them. That's why Rumsfeld, Cheney and others had to put together their own clandestine "intelligence" outfit within the administration to give their chicanery some semblance of legitimacy.

Now, of course, we have further confirmation of the Bushite deceit from Scott McClellan who speaks from personal experience. Bush lied, thousands, if not millions have died. Scott has given us chapter and verse how it happened.


Ambrose then moves into economics and claims this about the Bush tax cuts: "...in fact, it was the middle class that profited most. ... the middle class was getting richer by the day ... per capita income was rising as most progressed steadily in their circumstances."

Bosh! As Glenn Greenwald points out in his excellent book, Why We're Liberals, the Bush tax cuts created the opposite:

"In 2005, the wealthiest 1 percent of the country earned 21.2 percent of all income, according to IRS data, while the bottom 50 percent of all Americans earned just 12.8 percent of all income, down from 13.4 percent, a year earlier. Together, these two figures define a new postwar record for American economic inequality, which is believed by many economists to be greater today that at any other time since the 1920s.

"For working people, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the process of collecting this data began more than sixty years ago. In the period since 2000 the number of Americans living below the poverty line has increased by nearly a third. Meanwhile, the average CEO of a Standard & Poor's 500 company took home $13.51 million in total compensation in 2005 ... Believe it or not, by 11:02 A.M. of the first day or work on the first day of the year, one of these average CEO's will 'earn' more money that a minimum-wage worker in his company will make for the entire year."

Ambrose further complains that the Democrat's financial plans relative to Social Security and Medicare will "sink us."

(One of the main problems with Ambrose is he offers nothing to back up his allegations - other than the usual ultra-conservative mantra against big government, entitlement programs, etc., ad nauseum.)

Consider this, again from Mr. Greenwald:

"...under President Bush, tax collections fell to 16 percent of the GDP, while overall spending rose from 18.5 percent to 20.3 percent. Taken together, this imbalance creates a massive structural deficit that coming generations must somehow make up. (During the Clinton years, federal spending actually fell as a share of GDP, from 21.4 percent in 1993 to 18.5 percent in 2001.) Republican fiscal irresponsibility in this regard dwarfs that achieved during the 'taxing and spending' heyday of liberal Democrats, and yet it masks a case of even worse fiscal malfeasance that lurks barely beneath the surface: the entitlement budget. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, for instance, which today consume 7 percent of GDP, are slated to rise to 13 percent in 2030, at which time, according to present projections, they will represent 25 percent of the entire U.S. economy, or an unthinkable $700 billion a year in higher taxes. Current accounting practices allow these numbers to remain hidden to most journalists, and therefore most Americans, but the fact is, if the federal government were forced to adopt the standard accounting rules of corporate America, the 2006 federal deficit would have been more than $1.3 trillion, rather than the $248 billion claimed by the Bush administration. As of May, 2007, U.S. taxpayers owed a rapidly rising $59.1 trillion in liabilities, or the equivalent of more than half a million dollars for every household."

No, Mr. Ambrose, it has not been the "liberal" Democrats that have brought this country to its knees, it has been the so-called "conservative" Republicans, and, I might add, with malice aforethought.

But what Mr. Ambrose says next takes the proverbial cake. He concludes that "The overriding conservative principle is the maintenance of liberty in a constitutionally ordered democracy." And then has the audacity to warn, "If Democratic power increases as much as now appears likely, the party will almost surely go much further than the Republicans in waltzing away from liberty, the chief political foundation of our strength and energy."

It boggles the mind. Mr. Ambrose is not stupid. But those are incredibly stupid statements which have no connection with reality! The organization which actually cares about "the maintenance of liberty in a constitutionally ordered democracy" is not the Republican Party but the Democratic Party.

No group has done more to destroy "the maintenance of liberty in a constitutionally ordered democracy" than the bunch of Republican shysters running our government for the past seven and one-half years! From ignoring the laws of the land through signing statements, to suspending constitutional guarantees, to illegal spying on our citizens, to establishing laws denying certain people the right to vote, to attempting to establish a national ID system, to politicizing every area of government including the judicial branch, to rendition and illegal torture, the Bush administration and its Republican supporters have come perilously close to dismantling the basic structural foundation on which this country has stood for 200 plus years!

When it comes to "waltzing away from liberty," no group can possibly compete with the Republican Party!