E.D. Kain calls me "reflexively anti-Republican":
I have trouble understanding where Sullivan is coming from with a post like this one, criticizing Scott Brown’s apparently “mindless op-ed” by cherry-picking everything he can find that casts Brown in a poor light. Certainly some of Brown’s points in his op-ed are little more than standard GOP boilerplate. But the thing about boilerplate is that it accurately represents the views of a very large group of people. Cutting taxes is not in and of itself wrong-headed, however unsurprising the idea may be. Certainly it’s not as wrong-headed as raising taxes would be right now before a significant economic recovery, and with unemployment in the double digits.
But the absence of any proposals for spending cuts, which one assumes is a Republican concern, renders this point moot. The minute a Republican actually proposes a set of policies that would return us to fiscal balance through spending cuts alone, I'll listen. But none of them is honest enough to offer such a thing. To quote an anecdote from Peggy Noonan's column a week ago:
I spoke a few weeks ago with a respected Republican congressman who told me with some excitement of a bill he's put forward to address the growth of entitlements and long-term government spending. We only have three or four years to get it right, he said. He made a strong case. I asked if his party was doing anything to get behind the bill, and he got the blanched look people get when they're trying to keep their faces from betraying anything. Not really, he said. Then he shrugged. "They're waiting for the Democrats to destroy themselves."
I'm not reflexively anti-Republican. I have learned through bitter experience to oppose this kind of Bush Republican.
The Dish 