{"id":4788,"date":"2010-09-23T21:18:30","date_gmt":"2010-09-23T21:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=4788"},"modified":"2010-09-23T21:18:30","modified_gmt":"2010-09-23T21:18:30","slug":"republican-kitsch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/republican-kitsch\/","title":{"rendered":"Republican Kitsch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I heard some of the news conference introducing House Republican\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/09\/23\/us\/politics\/23repubs.html?scp=2&amp;sq=herszenhorn%20and%20pledge%20to%20america&amp;st=cse\">\u201cA Pledge to America\u201d <\/a>today.\u00a0 While some of the individual proposals\u2014such as ending government control of Fannie Mae and repealing the health care law (good luck)&#8211;actually have some concrete meaning, much of the boilerplate strikes me as almost kitsch in its bland familiarity:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Promising to \u201chonor the Constitution as constructed by its framers,\u201d the Republicans added: \u201cWe pledge to advance policies that promote greater liberty, wider opportunity, a robust defense and national economic prosperity. We pledge to honor families, traditional marriage, life and the private and faith-based organizations that form the core of our American values.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Republicans had eight years in the White House without shrinking government one iota; to the contrary, they expanded it greatly with Bush\u2019s radically unconservative Freedom Agenda wars, prescription drug entitlement, ongoing farm subsidies, Pentagon bloat, etc.\u00a0 Why should anyone believe them now?\u00a0 The Republican call for change is exactly as meaningless as the Obama call for change.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And do Republicans fail to reduce government because they get captured by Washington special interests or because in fact when it comes right down to it, there is no popular stomach for program cuts, despite the angry rhetoric to the contrary?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I heard some of the news conference introducing House Republican\u2019s \u201cA Pledge to America\u201d today.\u00a0 While some of the individual proposals\u2014such as ending government control of Fannie Mae and repealing the health care law (good luck)&#8211;actually have some concrete meaning, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/republican-kitsch\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[635],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4788"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4788"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4790,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4788\/revisions\/4790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}