His “Fair [sic] Tax” national sales tax has multiple marginal rates in it? I must have missed that. Admittedly, I was distracted by the ticker-tape parade actual antiwar activists gave Robert Novak for helping to out a covert CIA operative whose husband was critical of the administration’s justifications for war.

I suppose if Hell opposed the war, you’d at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in a blog comment . . .

Huckabee is running on a consumption tax, btw, not a flat tax.

More doom and gloom from the Democrats on Iraq. Devoid of any ideas, the party continues to seize on any piece of bad news and try to spin it against the Bush administration. But the president has his eye on the big picture.

Most Iraqis know the country is headed in the right direction, and so do most Americans, according to the polls. Only those Democrats determined to undermine the American mission there refuse to see this.Yeah, if his criticisms of Iraq got any more scathing, he’d start choking on George W. Bush’s scrotum.

Yeah, he wrote a couple of columns against “nation building.” Good for him. But whenever the chips were down in policy arguments over Iraq, it was magically time to beat up on the naysayers. See also his hero, Chuck Hagel, who has spent years expressing “grave reservations” about the Iraq morass, while voting repeatedly to give the President everything he asked for.

On the other hand, at least he’s sticking the knife into a socially-conservative Southern Baptist Republican who’s running on a revenue-destroying flat tax as being insufficiently conservative, which is apparently a sign of his principles.

the proliferation of intelligent, reasonable bruces across the liberal blogosphere.

sure, this one says he is bruce webb. but he sounds just as intelligent and reasonable as bruce moomaw. or bruce baugh. and i can’t tell the damn bruces apart.

if any of them were offering to crack a tube, then i’d say it was a monty python send up of australian philosophers. ditto if they were making rude jokes about poms or poofs.

but instead, they’re all sophisticated, articulate, non-hysterical blog-commenters who always have good, worthwhile things to say.

it’s a fucking plague. a plague of bruces.

In the final analysis these people (Bush/Cheney/Novak) simply don’t care about anything but their own self-interest. And this is not the product of someone with an advanced case of BDS (I plead guilty), instead a man very close to the center of power in this country simply opened the door and revealed a truth most of us believed all along.

These guys will skip church, screw around with other women, spend other people’s money like a sailor on shore leave, while not forgetting to keep a few dollars for themselves. And then try to preach social and fiscal conservatism on Sunday’s.

Novak essentially gave a huge ‘FU’ to the whole Religious Right coalition, right at the point that planet stewardship has begun to put pressure on Evangelical’s ability to restrict the message to abortion, guns and gays. Because most of the followers of the politicized Religious Right are not bad people. On the other hand I have exactly zero trouble with them sitting home on Election Day.

Bob may be so deep in the Beltway as to not know what harm he is causing his Party. To which I say ‘Good, keep ‘em coming’

The word is “running”. You are correct that it has been the wealthy business interests who have been “running” things, as is always the case, but they are not the ones complaining about their ideals being betrayed.

It is the pundit class who are the ideologues and that’s whose outpourings we are discussing. So, I guess “running” was the wrong word, I should have said “enabling” or something similar.

I don’t know what Scaife, Coors or the Koch’s feel about the GOP currently, but they continue to fund their think tanks and these institutions are increasingly critical of the Bushies. Are Cato, Heritage, Hoover, etc. suddenly becoming intellectually independent of their sponsors or do they reflect a new viewpoint from those who are “running” things?

See, I feel that exactly the opposite is true. Certainly in this case (the US in the past 40 years), but also in general. People who’re running things only care about money and power, and when necessary they’ll pay others to produce rationalizations, something that sounds like an ideology.

I think Novak’s mistake then is confusing necessary and sufficient conditions. Novak’s economic conservativism is sufficient for Novak to be deemed a conservative, but economic conservativism isn’t necessary for one to be so deemed.