Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

[MarkCharles]

Think Ron Paul in the South Carolina debate, when he said that in the '60s, "there was nobody out in the street suffering with no medical care." Paul also recalled that after World War II, 10 million soldiers came home and prospered without any kind of government aid at all – all they needed was a massive cut to the federal budget, and those soldiers just surfed on the resultant wave of economic progress.

"You know what the government did? They cut the budget by 60 percent," he said. "And everybody went back to work again, you didn't need any special programs."

Right – it wasn’t like they needed a G.I. Bill or anything. After all, people were different back then: They didn’t want or need welfare, or a health care program, or any of those things. At least, that’s not the way Paul remembered it.

That's all the early conservative movement was. It was just a heartfelt request that we go back to the good old days of America as these people remembered or imagined it. Of course, the problem was, we couldn't go back, not just because more than half the population (particularly the nonwhite, non-straight, non-male segment of the population) desperately didn't want to go back, but also because that America never existed and was therefore impossible to recreate.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/arizona-debate-conservative-chickens-come-home-to-roost-20120223#ixzz1nTc7vRkw

[HockeyMom]

1. My Dad came back from WW2 and became an ILA UNION member

because of the UNION he didn't need any of those "entitlements". My Nam Vet husband, who enlisted at 17, went to college in the early 70s under the GI bill.

[left is right]

2. I heard on an NPR program sometime in the late 90’s

that the government took in $14 in taxes for every $1 spent on GI benefits from WWII to Viet Nam. I remember thinking that GI benefits were a good investment in our human infrastructure

[MarkCharles]

3. Republican debates are so full of lies and misinformation

It resembles a Fox News show.

The Rolling Stone article and what Chris Hayes is saying on his morning show today about these debates, quite accurate: the candidates just leave out all the facts.