The supporter of a presidency that claimed unlimited power to detain anyone, including citizens, without trial, and torture them until they gave the government the answers they wanted, is now posing as a tea-partier! Yes, the defender of total executive power and abrogation of habeas corpus and sliming those lawyers wh defend terror suspects ... now presents himself as a latter-day John Adams. Look: you can't see these people lack chutzpah. And a man in an administration that increased spending during a boom more swiftly than any administration since LBJ also has no problem with attacking Barack Obama for the expense of a stimulus package and a bank bailout that saved us from the Second Great Depression. Being a Republican apparatchik means never having to remember, explain, apologize or take responsibility for anything.
He then praises the British Tories' austerity budget - and on this we can agree. But a quarter of the deficit reduction came from taxes. Which taxes would Thiessen raise? And what spending - on such a massive scale - would he actually cut?
We do not know. Because the point of his columns is not to propose anything. It is to find some way, any way, to attack the new president grappling with the enormous problems bequeathed to him by the man Thiessen worked for. Why? That's his job - and always has been his job. He's a partisan propagandist, a protege of Helms and Cheney. Why he is regarded as a journalist by the WaPo - and Dave Weigel isn't - is beyond me.