Charlie Cook and others are predicting a sea-change in public mood, with support for the GOP rising because of deficits. This strikes me as an amazing thing. It makes Charlie Brown, the football and Lucy look like the model of intelligent interaction. If you believe in fiscal conservatism, the last place on earth you should look for salvation is the GOP. They have single-handedly destroyed America's finances since the 1980s, with the sole exception of George H W Bush, who was rejected by his own party precisely because of his fiscal sobriety. The current debt is overwhelmingly inherited by Obama, and it would have been nuts to enter office in the downdraft of the sharp recession and set about cutting spending. Bush had eight years to restrain it and he didn't. He let it rip. Think of the GOP's phony concerns about the cost of the current healthcare bill and compare it with the GOP's prescription drug entitlement that Rove rammed through the Congress when the GOP held total power. The costs then were about eight times as great as the proposed costs now. But that was a Republican measure and so it doesn't somehow count as evidence of fiscal irresponsibility. But Nancy Pelosi only has to raise an eye-brow and the alarms go off.
Somehow - thanks in part to dishonest partisan hacks like Glenn Reynolds and Sean Hannity - the Bush-Cheney debt is all Obama's fault and you need to get Republicans back to fix it. A commenter on Bruce Bartlett's Forbes column has the best response to that:
The last Republican who left the office of the presidency with the federal public debt as a percentage of GDP less than when he entered was Richard Nixon (FY 1975). The last Republican who left the office of the presidency with a federal deficit less than 2.7% of GDP was Dwight Eisenhower (FY 1961). Since WW II no Democratic president has ever left office with the federal public debt as a percentage of GDP more than when he entered. And since WW II no Democratic president has ever left office with a federal deficit more than 2.6% of GDP.
We already have at least one party of fiscal responsibility. It's called the Democratic Party.
Which, of course, is still a problem. But nothing like the fiscal lunacy of the GOP.
Sully: Cheney's Lingering Legacy, Ctd
Among the wreckage he left behind is the botching and bullying of an effective and under-the-radar surveillance of a Jihadist cell in Britain. It took two trials to convict only three men of terrorism - because Cheney intervened:
Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, nearly destroyed Britain's efforts to bring the airline bomb plotters to justice, police and intelligence experts said today. By ordering the early arrest of Rashid Rauf, the bombers' link man in Pakistan, Washington forced British police to detain the suspects in the UK before all the evidence had been gathered, it was claimed.
I like the view of one of the detectives involved in professional counter-terrorism:
Fearful for the safety of American lives, the US authorities had been getting edgy, seeking reassurance that this was not going to slip through our hands. We moved from having congenial conversations to eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations.
We thought we had managed to persuade them to hold back so we could develop new opportunities and get more evidence to present to the courts. But I was never convinced that they were content with that position. In the end, I strongly suspect that they lost their nerve and had a hand in triggering the arrest in Pakistan.
And that, surely, is what really lies behind Cheney's embrace of torture, lawlessness, murder and violence: he does not have the nerve to defeat Jihadism the way the West has always defeated its enemies. Like many on the far right fringes, he is motivated primarily by fear, and paralyzed by paranoia.
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