Partisanship

Partisan politics has not only become rancorous, it has descended into illogic and insanity as each side tries desperately to defend positions which are becoming increasingly indefensible.

I have some small measure of respect for conservatives, who at least have some degree of consistency in their basic argument; they don’t want to impose taxes and they don’t want the government to spend money. I think their basic position is mistaken and without question they have taken arguments in defense of and positions with respect to it to ridiculous and destructive extremes, but at least the two parts of their basic ideology are not fundamentally at odds with each other.

I used to have great respect for what were then “tax and spend” liberals who felt that government should spend money to provide programs which created a social safety net and strengthened the social fabric of the nation, and that it should impose taxes sufficient to pay for those programs. They passed legislation such as Social Security, in which a person pays into the program for a lifetime and benefits from it upon retirement.

That group has now become “cut taxes and spend” liberals who still favor the government programs, but who no longer favor the imposition of taxes because suffering American voters cannot afford to pay taxes. They demonize health insurance companies as being the evil empire and then pass legislation which requires every citizen to purchase insurance from those evil health insurance companies.

They demonize “big business” as being the cause of American impoverishment, and claim that if they can just tax big business heavily enough to drive down their profits then the workers who are employed by big business will somehow become enriched.

The inconsistencies of the positions held by today’s liberals are myriad and baffling to me, and if you point that out and ask for clarification they simply become angry and call you names. Liberals actually spend far more time slinging accusations of “stupidity” and “insanity” at members of their opposition, and calling them “evil,” than they do either defending their own views or criticizing the opposition’s policies.

Neither side really makes any sense, but at least conservatives have not painted themselves into a corner and resorted to yelling, “Your mother wears combat boots.”