Wishful thinking, self-delusion, psychotic breaks, and the GOP alternate reality

To hear many Republican politicians talk (and I was a highly disaffected Republican for about a decade so I've heard a few), the GOP is the party of small government and fiscal responsibility.

When pressed, some of them will admit that our recent president, George W. Bush, had a little spending/borrowing problem.

But none of them seem to much like to confront the sad actual record of Republican presidents like George H.W. Bush or the sainted GOP hero, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan tripled the national debt in a mere two terms -- but G.H.W. Bush doubled it in only one.

Republican politicians like to pretend that they are the hard-headed, sensible. They say they want to run government like a business, yet when they begin to reshape government in their vision, we see patterns -- a culture really -- of corruption. Ronald Reagan's two terms saw more indictments and convictions among political appointees and underlings than with any president since Taft. The formal, legal mechanisms of the executive branch were subverted by the formation of a shadow executive, the investigation and dismantling of which culminated in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Doubling the national debt, the very next president, Republican George H.W. Bush, put a monkey on the back of American taxpayers and enterprises; the national economy buckled under the profligacy and fiscal irresponsibility.

But let's flash forward to the recent George W. Bush.

Republicans want to distance themselves from Bush -- but that is a wisdom that most of them came to only lately.

For most of the disastrous two terms of G.W. Bush, his fellow Republicans and he formed a synergism of poorly conceived and woefully ill-planned policies that undermined US economic competitiveness and security. The rest of the GOP was not off on sabbatical during G.W. Bush's terms. It was right there in active partnership with him, lurching from one disastrous misadventure to another, patting him on the back, saying, You're doin' a heck of a job, George!


I can't help but think about that when I see articles like this one in the Associated Press:
Analysis: GOP strategy makes national races tough