What happened to real Republicans?

Once upon a time in a place far, far away, Republicans were not the odious creatures they are today. Or so L.A. Heberlein would have you believe according to this piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, What happened to real Republicans?

When I was a Teenage Republican, all Republicans knew the 10th Amendment by heart and Republicans resisted the increasing power of the central government. Now Republicans leap over one another to make the federal government ever more powerful. It is Republicans at the federal level who now want to tell states whether they can allow medical marijuana or assisted suicide, or even who can have a driver's license. They want to tell the states who can get married. Imagine a Republican of my youth thinking the federal government should dictate policy to local school boards.

When I was a boy, Republicans cherished personal liberty. Creating secret no-fly lists and spy-on-your-neighbor programs, turning medical records over to police, holding people without trial in hidden military compounds, saying it's legal to torture them -- that's how we thought only Communists would behave.

Above all, the Republicans back in those days were the party of responsibility. They understood a balance sheet. "Yes," they would say, like a patient father with an immature child, "we'd all love that, but we can't afford it. Look right here at the numbers." Fiscal discipline was a value held almost as deeply as family and religion. Republicans knew that nothing works if you can't pay for it, that only ruin and shame can come from laying out more than you take in.

Where have all those Republicans gone? The ones running Washington, D.C., today inherited a $236 billion budget surplus, and like kids on crack with a credit card, turned it into a trillion-dollar deficit almost overnight.

If there was one thing the Republicans of my youth understood the value of, it was the American dollar. Today's Republicans stand around and watch the American dollar fall further every day. With our out-of-control trade deficits and increasingly shaky credit, all it might take is for one central banker from one small country to switch reserves to the Euro, and the dollar could plummet like the Space Shuttle Columbia, leaving a smoking trail of ugly wreckage.

When the issue of long-term planning for the future of Social Security came up, I thought maybe the Republicans I remember had resurfaced. That is exactly the sort of issue a white-haired Republican accountant for the water district would have raised in my youth. "Now, in 40 years," he would patiently explain, "the way these bonds are structured, we're going to have a shortfall, unless we adopt prudent measures right now." So the board would adopt prudent measures. After all, they were responsible people.

But have you followed the Social Security story? Do you know the plan?

The way Social Security works is that the people paying in support the people taking out. The "Republicans" in Washington want to let people stop paying in, so they can put their money in private investment accounts. But if we let people stop paying in, where's the money for people who are drawing out now?

Listen, you'll never believe this. The plan is to borrow it -- to borrow a trillion more dollars

Could any Republican leader before Reagan successfully survive in the radical party that the GOP has become? Nixon would probably be considered a Communist lover and Ford, an enabler of Democratic policies. Hell, Ike would be chased out the party after being tarred and feathered.

(Via the Smirking Chimp)