GOP CIvil War Over the Ryan Budget

I swear, nothing is more fun these days than watching the loons of the GOP tear each other apart as they try to destroy the nation's safety net for the elderly and unfortunate and jockey for supposed political advantage. The big question is whether Democrats will use the GOP free for all to their advantage or seize defeat from the jaws of victory yet again. The GOP civil war, if you will, was ignited by thrice married, serial adulterer and presidential wanna be Newt Gingrich who as CNN and other outlets are reporting:

*

[O]n Sunday TV, fresh from his presidential announcement, he [Gingrich] declared the House GOP plan for Medicare "right-wing social engineering." Then he went on to explain how he still supports individual mandates in health care -- despite the fact that the mandates are the key to the Republican attacks on the president's health care law.

*
The CNN article goes on to state:
*
Rep. Paul Ryan, the author of the GOP budget roadmap, likes to call his budget realistic and honest as it takes on Medicare spending. But it's more about theology than realism because of what it omits: tax hikes. So don't tell people you are going to change Medicare unless you're taking on everything. That's the lesson, only it's one the GOP refuses to utter. Even Gingrich, who threw Ryan overboard, would never say that.
*

Gingrich in short order tried to back track from his GOP heresy but seems to have only made matters worse for himself. Even as Gingrich tries to disingenuously duck and weave, he is being pummeled from all sides. David Frum - one of the vanishing breed of rational, thinking conservatives - on his blog calls it like it is: Gingrich spoke the truth. A truth that the GOP needs to hear if it ever will pull its head out of the bubble of the Tea Party and the crazy extremists of the Christian Taliban. That truth? That the Ryan budget and its goal of killing of Medicare is going to turn radioactive with voters as they figure out more of its real world implications. Here's what Frum has to say:
*
[T]he trigger for today’s [Wall Street] Journal attack was not Gingrich’s divisive or racially provocative statements. The trigger was actually a wise statement: a caution against committing the GOP to a huge rework of Medicare into a means-tested program that left more and more American seniors to pay more and more of their health insurance costs out of their own pockets. * The Ryan plan has become party orthodoxy, true. On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer proclaimed it a political capital offense to express public doubts about the plan. * But as Gingrich learned the hard way: the American public will not accept this kind of reform and will smash any politician who tries to force it upon them. There are ways to reduce the fiscal burden of Medicare, but telling seniors to buy their own damn healthcare is not going to be one of them. I wish it were somebody other than the Kenyan-anticolonialism-sharia law candidate making that argument, but it’s an important argument from any source.
*
I have more than a few reservations about giving Obama a second term, but when one sees the utter insanity and lack of any sense of being tethered to reality that now is a prerequisite for popularity with the BOP base and the Tea Party crowd, one can only think that the GOP is out for self-immolation in 2012 unless an adult can take charge of the asylum.

The $2 Trillion Nightmare

Bob Herbert at the New York Times has a good opinion column in today's paper (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html?em&ex=1204779600&en=c44ca333e64258c9&ei=5087%0A) that focuses on the financial cost of the Iraq War. It does not even get into the costs in terms of lives lost - both American and Iraqi, although obviously the latter mean nothing to the Christianist base of the GOP - and the increased danger to the USA as a result of the Chimperator's ill-conceived and fraudulently marketed war adventure. Sadly, not enough attention has been paid to this financial disaster which John McCain is willing to extend indefinitely and for which Hillary Clinton voted authorization TWICE. Here are some highlights that look at other ways this incedibly vast amount of money might better have been spent:

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy. Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

What we’re getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Mr. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war. These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.”

The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through “emergency” appropriations that get far less scrutiny.