The Maine Fiscal Conservatives

SteynOnline - THE GIRLYMAN GOVERNOR:

"I see the nice Maine ladies, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, were hailed for reaching across the aisle on the “stimulus” bill by William Cohen, who helpfully explained to The Washington Post that Pine Tree Staters are “liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal matters.” And nothing says “fiscally conservative” like voting for a trillion dollars of pork after you’ve stayed up three nights in a row carefully weeding out the $473.84 that shouldn’t have been in there."...

...the reality is that almost every “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” politician turns out to be fiscally liberal — in the same way that, if you mix half a pint of vanilla ice cream with half a pint of horse manure, it’s not hard to figure which taste will predominate.

I'm pretty sure the ladies signed on to the $421B budget, too, didn't they?

I better stop excerpting so much Mark Steyn or he's gonna sue me. But he's so witty. Go to http://www.steynonline.com/ anytime you need a good laugh.

What Steele Should Have Said to Matt

Rive gauche - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online:

"Twenty-five million people listened to Rush last week. Millions of them have listened to him for 20 years. That makes them 'hard-right' extremists.

Whereas being one of a few thousand who listened to Jeremiah Wright every week for 20 years makes you a mainstream moderate."

I realize that it's not always easy to come up with stuff like this while under fire, but Michael Steele needs to take the fight to them. It was devastating for him to be apologizing for Rush Limbaugh. It was also devastating for him to tacitly agree with this statement by CNN personality, D.L. Hugely:

“The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied -- like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention....It literally look[s] like Nazi Germany.”

I worked for Mr Steele's senate campaign and have a high regard for him, but if he can't do better than he did this past week, he should pack it in. We need a leader, not an apologist-in-chief.