Don’t say you weren’t warned
So the Senate passed a “jobs bill” yesterday and did so with the help of one Scott Brown of Massachusetts. There are many out there feeling betrayed right now but they shouldn’t be. In fact they’re getting what they honestly deserve, a Republican hack, one they helped put into office even though they warned well in advance.
Let this be a lesson to Tea Partiers out there not to let the first Republican hack like Patrick Ruffni come along and use your sweat equity and your money for the party’s own purposes. There will be other Republican Party reptiles and Conservative INC. flunkies who come along and blast you with emails who will say vote for such-and-such candidate because he can stop Obamacare or vote for this fellow over year because he’ll stop cap-n-trade. No doubt voting for someone who promised to be the 41st vote to stop a government takeover of healthcare (what, you mean government doesn’t already have a big say in how health care is done in this country?) was quite attractive, but, as the old saying goes: “Let the buyer beware”.
For you see, anyone studying Scott Brown’s record from his time in the Massachusetts state legislature would have known that his vote was quite in line with his views. He doesn’t mind spending your tax money because he thinks it will create “jobs”. Now, I suppose government can create a job if you don’t mind digging a ditch, going door to door or working the road crew. But these jobs tend to be temporary and don’t really affect the economy as whole a great deal. Conservatives used to criticize such proposals as “makework” jobs and some still do, when they’re not bragging to their constituents how much stimulus money they’re bringing home. Still it is curious to ask why if Brown thinks government can’t run the nation’s health care, why then does he believe it can somehow sustain economic growth through taxpayer largess? If the health care debate was fashioned as a way to stimulate the economy by reducing costs, would Brown still be the 41st vote? Can you be sure of that?
Joe Kennedy, the independent libertarian who also ran for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, pointed this out to anyone who would listen. For his trouble he received death threats by Brown supporters. Brown, to his credit, never claimed to be a conservative anything, just an “independent voice in Washington.” The people projecting the image of Jim DeMint on Brown were the Tea Partiers themselves and the Republican hacks encouraging them to do so. That they feel betrayed is understandable but they cannot blame Scott Brown for this. They were misled and fooled because slick political rhetoricians knew exactly how to take advantage of them. They need to realize that candidates like Scott Brown are exactly the reason why the Tea Party’s exist and the reason why they are they upset in the first place. And they need to realize that candidates like Joe Kennedy are the ones they need to support in the future. But they can only do this through careful study and thought and not through headless emotion.
Of course Brown, from now on, better find another group of people to do his sign-waving the snow because the Tea Partiers certainly won’t. MaybeRyan Sorba is available.
Granted that conservatives shouldn’t have stupidly cheerleaded Brown on as the vanguard of the coming conservative revival, it still remains true that Brown was the least horrible option among candidates with a non-zero chance of winning. Kennedy would have been a better senator, but then so would have Jesus, and both had about the same chance of being elected.
Conservatives that haven’t already made their peace with the long decay may as well get used to this constant rearguard action, fighting tooth and nail to elect marginally worse candidates than the opposition. Such is the state of this great nation.
[...] all conservatives were surprised, including a writer at The American Conservative, had actually looked at Brown’s record. Sean Scallon writes that the Tea Partiers were misled [...]
Yikes! I see a proofread in your future.
[...] My initial reaction to Scott Brown’s vote on the jobs bill was something like Sean Scallon’s. Hey–I’m boring and predictable sometimes, [...]
So the federal government can’t create long-term jobs? Only temporary ditch-digging and door-to-door work?
How about careers in the U.S. military? Or the CIA? Or in the nuclear weapons complex? Since those aren’t real jobs, maybe we should just outsource them overseas and save the taxpayers a bundle.
CM, you embarrass yourself.
Only a lib wouldn’t get it.
Income minus expense equals profit.
The Military and the CIA are necessary EXPENSES. The company, or in this case our country, will suffer if such expenses are not kept to a minimum.
Government workers are useful, but they do NOT produce goods and services that our country can sell. That is, by and large, they do not contribute to our GDP.
Think of a factory that forgets to hire top management, hires a clown to run the company, hires an enormous amount of secretaries (and because we have sympathy for them, let’s pay them twice what they are worth to us), and fires nearly all the factory workers.
Now go out into the community and poison the education of the community workpool: everyone plays video games and doesn’t want to work, let’s house, feed, clothe and doctor them for free. Teach them that they don’t have to follow anybody’s orders, or keep agreements, or keep their word.
That’s the way that LIBs such as yourself would run the US.
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Hey Sean, the LIBs also can’t understand a politician who is true to his constituency. They can’t understand why the electorate’s needs and desires would necessarily override the politician’s “superior understanding” of what is good for them.
That same lib wouldn’t understand why most conservatives are not “shocked” or “disappointed” when a politician is true to his constituents, regardless of his “R” or his “D”.
A lib’s arrogance will allow him to construct caricatures, and have absolute faith in their ability to predict what he doesn’t understand.
The author cannot possibly be serious about this charge. Those of us that worked for Brown that were solidly conservative knew full well that he was no Barry Goldwater nor expected him to be. For crying out loud, he was running as a Republican in Massachusetts! No one but a Kennedy (or a coat holder thereto) has held that seat for nearly sixty years and you’re bellyaching that he doesn’t measure up as a Conservative? Give me a break. Would you rather have Brown in the seat promising to be open minded about legislation that crosses his desk or a Coakley would most certainly have died in her seat forty years hence having never once not voted the party line.
The perfect should never be the enemy of the good.
We will have our opportunity to advance a plethora of solidly conservative candidates in the future, but make no mistake that we all owe Scott Brown our undying gratitude for single handedly throwing a monkey wrench into the Obama agenda. Without his win in January, the health care juggernaut would be a done deal right now.
Mr Scallon,
I think Matt (Swarz?) and Turfmann said it better than I could, but here’s a go: Brown’s election derailed the sure, filibuster-proof passage of a(nother) giant leap towards socialized medicine in America.
The real work of electing conservatives that understand constitutional government and free markets– and are committed to achieving this in America– is going to take place in states likely to elect a Republican. In other words, the greatest good can be achieved in the states that have been Hannitized.
These earnest voters need to know that privileged business interests (from insurance cartels to agent banks in the central banking system) have been lying for generations about what a free market is. They need to know that the communitarian solutions of progressives are not bad solutions to the flaws of a free market, but the moral consequence of distorting the definition of a free market into any environment in which there is private ownership and low taxes.
How many red-state “conservatives” reliably vote, in the name of the public good, to use tax dollars to insure the giants of private enterprise against imprudent decisions? How many think that human action must be managed by the federal state? How many cheerlead the empire and its military industrial complex?
Knock on doors in Georgia and Texas. The best we can hope for (for now) from the voters in Massuchusetts is Dem-Lite.
Sorry, for the proofreading mistakes, not my strongpoint.
Socialized medicine already exists. It exists through Medicare and Medicade. It exists through a tax system that favors company-based health plans rather than purchasing health care by individuals as one purchases home or auto insurance. It exists statewide in places like Massachusetts and Scott Brown voted to support it.
If the only kind of “Republican” that can win in Northeast is a Rudy Guliani type that promises not just to spend my tax dollars and your not only on war and torture, but also to bankrupt the treasury with “job bills” then I’m sorry, I’m not impressed. I would have thought a Ron Paul-type Republicans promising personal liberty and traditional New England frugality would have been more appealing, but Joe Kennedy was ignored so you all your left with is…Scott Brown.
Now there’s a thought…Let’s expand the military and the CIA to reduce unemployment!
The government is already involved in healthcare, yes, but not to the tune of a trillion dollars–yet. I don’t share your dismissal of the implications of Obamacare; especially not compared to a 15 billion jobs bill, which would be a rounding error for Obamacare.
I’m not impressed with Scott Brown either; I think we can all agree that the hysteria over his win was a tad much. But at least we don’t have Obamacare–yet. If that’s the best I can get, and it surely is, then that’s what I’ll take.