November 3rd, 2009
Tuesday’s off-year election victories for Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey should send a caution signal to Democrats who run Congress and President Obama: You’ve gone too far left, come back to the center-right, where the majority of the country’s voters are.
Frankly, I’m horrified at the Democrats’ idea of health care reform. And their cap and trade energy bill is even worse.
Both bills will punish the middle class as well as the small and medium sized businesses that employ them. New taxes, reductions in Medicare and mind-numbing bureaucracy are not my idea of reform. Millions of jobs are at stake. And their health care bill does not come close to covering everybody.
At this point, “No” is the appropriate answer to Democratic bills on health care and energy. I think that’s what voters in Virginia and New Jersey were saying. (Results from NY 23 congressional race have not come in yet.)
November 3rd, 2009
It’s become an item of faith among conservative commentators that Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” — resulted in the actual wall coming down two years later, when he was out of office.
That is not how former President George H. W. Bush (”41″) sees it. Indeed, he commits what the “right” sees as the ultimate sin, giving credit for the wall’s demise to former U.S.S.R Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev himself.
I’m not making this up — I saw and heard Bush say it on Greta Monday night on Fox.
Greta was in Berlin to cover ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the wall’s tumble, as was Bush 41. She interviewed him. Greta kept trying to get Bush to take credit for the Berlin Wall coming down, and he repeatedly refused to accept it, giving the lion’s share of credit to Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, the attempt to forge a kinder, gentler, form of communism in the East Bloc and Soviet Union.
What happened instead was that as soon as people tasted a little freedom, they wanted more, and within two years the East Bloc nations had shaken off communism, most peacefully, one (Romania) brutally.
Finally, on Christmas Day 1991, the mighty Soviet Union itself went out of business, to be replaced the next day by the Russian Federation, a whole slew of “independistans” and three, free Baltic states.
Bush also noted to Greta that the U.S.’s controversial decision to install Pershing missles in Europe in 1982 also hastened communism’s demise, because it signaled to Moscow that the western allies were not going to back down from strong opposition to the Soviets and their client states.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize, which Bush 41 also mentioned.
