The Steady Stream of Empty Conservative Pledges

[MrScorpio]

FINDING A VOICE by Ann Davidow

We have become a nation of pledgers, a steady harangue of forced allegiance to one drill or another. Newly elected legislators rush around the halls of Congress signing up supporters of everything from a defense of marriage to deficit reduction to a balanced-budget constitutional amendment. It's enough to make one's head spin, a rash of promises forged into a meaningless jumble of partisan talking points.

The act of signing on to one of these pledges is an indication that we have given up trying to find logical solutions to the country's problems and that economic hucksters have been able to freeze intelligent thought wherever it occurs. Grover Norquist has rallied his supporters behind a pledge not to raise taxes. There's another calling itself the "pro-life" pledge. And candidates are expected to sign on or lose right-wing support in the primary and general elections. Bob Vander Plaats of The Family Leader says, "We believe that ...candidates' positions on core values such as marriage correlate directly to his/her moral stances on energy issues, sound budgeting policies, national defense and economic policies." How anyone could buy into such an irrational conclusion is hard to imagine, but that's the fractured political world in which we live.

It fits perfectly with the way Republicans have gone about addressing the debt-ceiling which has become so intertwined with ideological conservative themes that the task of putting the pieces back in their proper order has become almost insurmountable. With conservative leaders in the House insisting there's a connection between the debt limit and spending curbs the way back to fiscal sanity seems ever more elusive. Perhaps it hasn't been said often enough that the debt limit needs to be raised in order to satisfy debts the country has already incurred not to allow the government to increase spending. That is a basic truth the right wing chooses to ignore when it preaches fiscal austerity and tries to attach entitlement-killing provisions to legislation intended to adjust the economy in less draconian fashion.

Why do Democrats allow Republicans to continue saying that putting an end to tax subsidies, for example, is in fact raising taxes? And why hasn't the practice of hiding profits off-shore to avoid taxes been more vociferously condemned? When conservatives assert that markets should be allowed to set financial parameters with as few regulations as possible where are the voices of reason asserting even more loudly that poor regulation and a tax code that countenances a precipitous tilt in the direction of the rich and corporate interests do irreparable harm to our economic condition?

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12845