10 years from now, if the right folks get elected this November, we should be beyond worrying where extra oil is going to come from.

By the way, Cap–”economists have proven” that the tax cuts helped? Prove it–without using the words “Heritage Foundation” or “American Enterprise Institute.” Then tell it to your children and grandchildren.

10 years from now, if the right folks get elected this November, we should be beyond worrying where extra oil is going to come from.

By the way, Cap–”economists have proven” that the tax cuts helped? Prove it–without using the words “Heritage Foundation” or “American Enterprise Institute.” Then tell it to your children and grandchildren.

You can blame W., its what silly liberals do about everything – but I prefer to look at real facts and policies which have resulted in what we're experiencing.

Ain't it funny that the two things Bush / Cheney brought to America, record oil profits and war, directly correspond to their former working relationships? Hmmm, they said. Wonder if these horrors are just them paving the way for their cushy civilian futures…

Reagan cut taxes to the bone in '81, then–through his administration and Bush 41's–the GOP never tried to make any significant spending cuts (or at least didn't ever fight for them). By '91-'92 we were into huge deficits and recession.

Then Clinton balanced the budget and even left it in projected surplus. Enter another Bush, demanding and getting huge tax cuts for the wealthy but once again disregarding the supposed other half of conservative orthodoxy–all of this with a Republican Congress giving him a rim job and cheering him all the way.

All Republican politicians care about is cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends down at the club, jacking up military spending to keep Halliburton and McDonnell-Douglas happy, and manipulating the electoral process so that they remain in power. They'll spend all the money it takes to keep the middle-class voters they've tricked happy, as long as they can game the system to simultaneously juice the oil and pharma companies, kill the labor movement, and install judges who will codify their power grabs (voter ID), look the other way on their torture and wiretapping, and rubber-stamp their bigotry against everybody who isn't a straight white male Christian.

Bush is the ULTIMATE conservative Republican.

Where conservatism went off the track was their failure to pass a balanced budget amendment, which would go hand in hand with a limitation on tax increases. That was the most important part of Gingrich's contract with America, and they fudged on it. The recently much-maligned Ben Stein made the same point about the GOP and it's insane ideas about deficits not mattering. The trouble we're seeing is because conservatives did not stick to their principles.

I agree, no one wants to talk honestly about this most basic of issues. Truth hurts, and no one wants to be the bearer of bad news.

The 2000s by that account are, for many people, nothing less than a re-visitation of all the mistakes of the 1970s. Nope, in many cases, we definitely aren't better off than our parents. We are exactly like them.