Motley Moose – Archive

Conservatives keep saying that families in America have to live within their means and not spend more than they make.  I am not convinced that experience within a family can be extended to government.  I am not convinced that the goals are the same, nor do I believe the premise scales.  However, even if we give conservatives this premise, their argument fails.

It was unusually sunny this morning at the Central London polling station when I voted in the UK General Election. If the steady stream of voters I saw is anything to go by, turnout looks to be high – up to 70 per cent from the 60 per cent turnout in 2005. There are many reasons for this… and not of a few of them connected to Obama’s campaign in 2008, which not only re-energised my interest in politics (and the left wing blogosphere) but captivated the country.

But the kind of change the British General Election has ushered isn’t that obvious, as can be seen from thee front page the Murdoch-owned best-selling conservative leaning Tabloid this morning.

Yes, you got it. The people who supported John McCain, the company that brings you the 24 hour asinine right wing ass-hattery of  FOX TV, have the temerity to use the Obama Change image as their crucial headline.

‘It was the Sun Wot Won it’ was the famous refrain after the tabloid claimed it swayed the last close election – in 1992 – for the Tories. Recently, the Political Editor of The Sun told some journalists recently that his job was ‘to win the fucking election for David Cameron’ (one of his predecessors on the Sunday Murdoch Tabloid is none other than the Conservative Campaign Honcho). There are several transparent  financial interests that the Murdoch Empire has in a Conservative election victory in the UK, as the spoofters have already spotted..

More of these to be found here. But the bigger question is – how can a Conservative candidate be an avatar of change? And what kind of change is the UK looking for?

The political spectrum in this country is usually divided into 3 broad groups: Left, Center, Right. This is a very simplified description. Because of that simplicity, the media loves to break the country down into those three groups.

While I disagree with this simplistic approach, my main disagreement is what the media claims constitutes the center.

The recent cuts in the Senate to the House version of the stimulus bill have been hailed as an effort lead by centrists to hold the line on pork and spending. That’s the media’s interpretation of events. In reality, these cuts look like a wish list from the Right.

Most of the cuts can be categorized in five main groups: education, science, health care, the environment, and law enforcement. All of these, except for law enforcement, are areas that the conservative right has fought against. Even law enforcement is starting to get short shrift from the Right. They prefer privatized prisons, so prison funding had to go.

Photo courtesy of CuriousGeorge81

Some of the other cuts are completely nonsensical.

Full list after the break.

It’s hard to turn the channel to a cable news station these days without hearing some conservative pundit making the claim that America is a center-right country. They have been making this claim for a long time. It is one of the core beliefs of the conservative movement stated with the same assurance given to the belief in supply-side economics. Unfortunately, for them, neither claim is valid.



One thing that I’ve come to recognize about the modern conservative movement is that the more forcefully conservatives claim something is true without offering any substantiating proof the more likely it is to be false. That’s the case with the center-right claim.

This country hasn’t been center-right for a long time. Oh sure, there are some issues that pull the electorate to the right, mainly Gays, God, and guns. However, the majority in this country favor moderate to liberal stances on almost all of the major issues. The conservatives are obviously in the denial stage of grief after losing power.