JUST WHEN YOU THINK…

The ruling Republicans cannot get more self-congratulatory or off-key, we have Tom DeLay saying that there’s no fat left in the U.S. budget. Er, Mr DeLay, you have presided over the biggest explosion in pork and government spending in living memory. You and your president, in an astonishingly swift five years, have managed to add $2 trillion to the debt we and the next generation will have to pay back in taxes or inflation. “No fat left to cut?” This is what conservatism has now come to mean: the worst aspects of big government liberalism with the worst aspects of meddling in the moral decisions of people’s private lives. And the people who have done this seem oblivious to it. I will remind you, Tom DeLay equated a balanced budget with fiscal sanity in the Clinton years. But now it’s his budget, and his constituents and interest groups who get to feed at the trough, and the sky is the limit. A reminder to fiscal conservatives: today’s GOP isn’t just not what it used to be; it’s your main enemy now. Conservatism has been hijacked by puritans and spendthrifts. Their unifying philosophy is meddling in other people’s lives and spending other people’s money.