Through The Gop Looking Glass

If a person were to support gun control, abortion rights, national health care, cuts in defense spending and amnesty for military deserters, how would you describe him politically?

You would say he was a liberal, maybe even a socialist.

And you’d be right. Let’s look back over the last 40 years or so and see what havoc these lily-livered liberals have wrought.

On the subject of defense spending and the perils of the expansion of the military-industrial complex, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, father of what he called “modern Republicanism,” said:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Don’t you hate it when the liberals get all weepy like that?

As if that weren’t enough, Eisenhower then raised the minimum wage, strengthened the nation’s welfare programs and created the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Then he sent federal troops to Arkansas to forcefully integrate public schools.

Later on, President Richard Nixon proposed spending $10 billion on a clean water program, saying it was time to “… make peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water.”

There they go, getting all touchy-feely again.

The next year, in 1971, Nixon proposed, “a program to ensure that no American family will be prevented from obtaining basic medical care by inability to pay.” And he kept on fighting for his national health insurance program. In 1974, he proposed a national health insurance program that would provide coverage for doctor fees; hospitalization; catastrophic illness; prescription drugs; treatment for mental illness, alcoholism and drug addiction; eye, ear and dental care for children; and family planning. If you could not afford the national insurance, the federal government would subsidize your coverage.

Later that year, Nixon signed into law the 55 mph speed limit and the creation of the Federal Energy Administration.

Nixon even instituted federal revenue sharing, a socialist scheme to redistribute the wealth if ever there was one.

In 1974, President Gerald Ford was asked about a proposal by California Gov. Ronald Reagan to reduce federal spending by shifting welfare and other poverty programs to the states. ” … any reduction in the federal budget of $90 billion, turning all that extra responsibility over to each of the 50 states would not be acceptable.”

Ford was also soft on crime. Not only did he pardon Nixon of any federal crimes he may have committed during the Watergate scandal, but he also offered amnesty for all draft dodgers and deserters from the Vietnam era.

Even Reagan had a liberal streak, which appeared when he supported publicly the passage of the Brady Law, which imposed restrictions on handgun ownership.

(His wife, Nancy, then came out of the prochoice closet and said that, unlike her husband, she supported the right of a woman to have an abortion.)

Reagan’s successor, George Bush, instituted one of the largest tax increases in the history of mankind.

Finally, in December of 1994, former senator, former Republican presidential nominee and patriarch of contemporary conservatism Barry Goldwater was named Civil Libertarian of the Year by the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union for speaking out for abortion rights and homosexuals in the military.

He said his stands were based on his philosophy that such things are none of the government’s business. Yeah, right. Don’t you just hate it when liberals try to rationalize their silly actions?

Then, as if that weren’t enough, Goldwater scolded Republican lawmakers to “stop nit-picking this thing called Whitewater.”

People wonder how it was Bill Clinton got elected president. Apparently people were tired of those big-government, defense-cutting, soft-on-crime, bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend liberal Republicans.

xxxx