Big Gov

You have heard it from the righty words of the Right: Mr. Obama is all about Big Government. He is out to establish an ever-widening web of czars and sundry civil servants who will take away our every option for free action and self-determination. Right? Right.

But not so fast. What would the Right do, if they were in power now? What did they do when Bush was in the oval office (he was in the oval office occasionally, wasn't he)?

The Republicans under Bush took big chunks of our personal freedom away ('Patriot' Act) and tried to turn the Iraq War into one giant pension fund for Cheney et al - witness all those no-bid KBR and Halliburton contracts. They told us who could marry who, and fought to ensure women couldn't make decisions about their own bodies. They spent billions on wars that never had to happen, costing thousands of American lives, as means to an end that wasn't even right, wasn't even necessary, and they left us with a global, very costly, mess to clean up (if we even can). They dismissed an entire industry of airport security scanners and replaced them with a bureaucratic agency, the TSA, that does - as far as I can see - exactly what the previous scanners did, only with a lot more people (and I will guess at far greater cost).

Big Government happens with both parties, it's the approach and the goals that differ. Me, I'd prefer a government that gets big trying to help me and my fellow citizens, rather than one that bloats with ways and means of spying on us, and wages big war across the globe.