<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" God, I love Republicans who tell the truth. Michael Gersoncame out swinging in The Washington Post this Friday, taking on libertarians and Tea Party extremists with the verbal verve that made him George W. Bush&amp;#039;s top speechwriter. On the matter of Sharron Angle? The whole thing about how Tea Parties were &amp;quot;really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies&amp;quot; unless Congress changed fast? Just to be clear, Gerson says. A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. The libertarianism of Rand Paul, the Senate candidate from Kentucky who&amp;#039;s running on smoke and crazy? In America, the ideology of libertarianism is itself a scandal. It involves not only a retreat from Obamaism but a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantagesd, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments. It&amp;#039;s so reassuring to see these simple, straightforward statements coming from a Republican in public. I put &amp;quot;in public&amp;quot; in italics because I&amp;#039;ve had plenty of these conversations in private. When you ask them if they really want to eliminate Social Security or the EPA or stop all foreign aid, they smile and say, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not crazy.&amp;quot; What they really want to do is what Republicans always want to do: cut taxes, create a more favorable business environment, support a strong defense, and maybe reduce the availability of abortion. But now that the Republican Party has abandoned those relatively sober goals for a fantasy revolution straight out of Red Dawn, the blogs and think tanks are turning into Siberia for an increasing number of Republican apostates: David Frum, Bruce Bartlett, Andrew Sullivan, Gerson, and these five guys (Man, the things Bob Inglis is saying! &amp;quot;There were no death panels in the bill ... and to encourage that kind of fear is just the lowest form of political leadership.&amp;quot; Is he really a South Carolina Republican?). Also Tyler Cowen, a libertarian-leaning economist from George Mason University who slipped this explosive little truth into a recent New York Times column about how Germany is getting a handle on its debt: It&amp;#039;s also well-understood in Germany that tax cuts need to be paid for. Democrats need to shout that line from the rooftops. All by itself, it blows 90-percent of Republican posturing on the deficit out of the water. Because, mosquito, tax cuts are a form of government spending. That&amp;#039;s why the massive tax cuts George W. Bush put through in 2001 drove the deficit higher and higher, affecting the structural annual deficit far more than Obama&amp;#039;s temporary stimulus ever could. Here&amp;#039;s a line from a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in 2005: The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for nearly half \u2014 48 percent \u2014 of this $539 billion in increased costs. But acknowledging that simple truth would require Republicans to abandon their overblown rhetoric and settle for small and incremental reforms within the context of the system we have. Calling for revolution is much more fun. It&amp;#039;s striking, though, how many of the things they say are total bullshit. Live Free or Die, for example, which has gone from obscure state motto to bumper sticker of the decade. Does anybody really mean it literally? Seriously, if you had a choice between living in a dictatorship or dying, would you choose death? If you had to go to prison, would you kill yourself? Speaking of Angle&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Second Amendment remedies,&amp;quot; Gerson nails the movement&amp;#039;s phony theatricality perfectly: It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt \u2014 a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of &amp;quot;Second Amendment remedies&amp;quot; is a lightweight Lexington, a cut-rate Concord. It is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory. In the long term, the Tea Party movement destroys the Republican brand. You can&amp;#039;t be a conservative revolutionary. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a7929/michael-gerson-rand-paul-analysis-071910/>