Yahoo! News has a morning headline titled "How Democrats Lost ‘Don’t Ask’ Repeal." (You can read it here). It focuses almost entirely on the "Don’t Ask" repeal provision and to some degree on the tactics that epitomize Ried’s Senate antics. He takes a defense authorization bill, adds Don’t ask don’t tell, then stuffs amnesty for illegal immigrants into it, and then refuses to allow Republican amendments.
The article, and most of those that I have seen on the subject, all focus on the failure to repeal "Don’t Ask" as if that were actually the point. But this had nothing to with that. It was a tactical political media ploy. Think about it.
The economic relationship between government, the private sector, and the people, has been the object of much debate as democrats try to convince people that spending trillions we don’t have has some kind of payoff at the other end. The fact that we can’t see that "end" and none of their predictions have come true fuels the fires of the opposition while encouraging proponents to claim we just need to wait a bit longer–or spend a few trillion more.
Paul Hodes is trying to restyle himself as a fiscal conservative. As a Washington outsider. But Washington outsiders don’t get huge campaign donations from the left wings senatorial elite Like Dan Inoyue, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez. Paul Hodes does.
The first thing you have to understand is that to support Mr. Hodes position on letting tax cuts expire you have to be of the opinion that your property is only yours because the government allows you to keep it.
There is ample evidence that Paul Hodes toes the line, is a Kool Aid drinker, and a reliable party hack. Each effort to sell himself as having fiscal integrity or ethics is met with an abundance of contradictory evidence. So to suggest that he is an independent thinker lacks veracity unless you mean independent from reality. To further demonstrate this break Hodes spokesman Bergman (not Ingrid but Mark) defended his paymaster from a recent attack on his record. (From the Union Leader)
The democrats economic agenda uses rhetoric and class warfare to get you to believe things that are not true. The biggest of these sins regards taxes–it is the biggest because they cannot possibly run their huge government without your money.