Listen to Rush Limbaugh or any prominent "conservative" these days with an open mind and you'll start to notice a change in what they're all about.  It's not about principles. It's about winning. Period.

The Republicans control the house, the senate, and the Presidency. They've got everything they want. And what are they doing with it? Squandering it.  What ever happened to all the big, principled ideas that the right always claimed they had? Remember the Contract with America? How they doing on that? Line-Item veto? Has Bush ever used it? Did it get passed? Dunno. Term limits for congressman? Nope. Balancing the budget? HA.

Instead what we're witnessing is a feeding frenzy at the trough of government waste. Pork barrel spending has reached record highs according to a study by Heritage foundation, no lefty think-tank there. Most of the energy has been spent trying to shoe horn religious fundamentalist judges in. You would think that the Democrats were blocking all of Bush's judges. But of the hundreds of judges put before the senate, all but a handful have gone through.

Republicans and conservatives bristle when progressive refer to international law and the United Nations as a source of thought and wisdom. Fine. But many people in our country bristle at the bible being the source of widsom and insight used by unelected judges.

When Republicans aren't blowing their opportunities by wasting time on a handful of judges, they're torpedoing their future opportunities by trying to mess around with social security. Social security might have problems in 50 years if we do nothing at all? Woe is us. The current deficit, the one we have TODAY is something we should be more worried about. Worrying about a deficit 50 years from now while ignoring a large one in the present is ludicrous.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are so enthralled by big business that they've ceded much of our industrial base to "Red" China. It's ironic that the Republicans who made such a big fuss about the US doing anything with China when Clinton was President have basically surrendered our economic future to them.

Our imports are increasing while our exports are flat.

http://www.marktaw.com/culture_and_media/TheUSTradeDeficit.html

How bad is our trade deficit these days? You won't hear Rush or any other conservatives talk about it but last year we exported around $30 billion to China while importing nearly $150 billion. Too bad we can't count exported jobs as an export, our balance might not be so bad.  We export nearly as much to South Korea as we do to all of China.

The Republicans claim to stand for a lot of things. Talk is cheap. When it comes to action, the Republicans are becomingly transparently the party of greed. Worse, they're getting so smug about winning that they're overreaching. The "in your face" attitude we're seeing from congress is going to cost them. If in 2008 we're electing President Hillary, the Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves.