It was just a year and a half ago when Time magazine promoted Gov. Arnold and Mayor Bloomberg as “The New Action Heroes.” Other magazines and newspaper editorials said something similar.
Time gushed:
Bloomberg is 65; the Last Action Hero is turning 60; they’ve got better things to do than bicker and posture. “These are two exceptional and forceful guys who don’t need the job at all; they had pretty damn good lives before they got into politics,” says their mutual friend Warren Buffett. “They’re in office to get things done. And they’re doing that a lot better than anyone in D.C.”
“Postpartisanship” meant getting beyond the petty quarrels of Republicans and Democrats. It meant being moderately pro-business on economics, and “moderate” — meaning left-wing — on such social issues as abortion, stem-cell research (high-tech infant cannibalism), and same-sex “marriage.” And it meant getting around Washington roadblocks to personally promote ending “global warming.”
Bloomberg was touted as the next president, and early this year even briefly flirted with running as a third-party candidate. Commentators lamented that Schwarzenegger couldn’t run for president because he was born in Austria.
There even was a book about the trend, out a year ago, “Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter,” by Dan Weintraub. Blurb:
Party of One goes beyond a portrait of a political celebrity. Detailing Schwarzenegger’s gambits, missteps, and achievements on a range of issues, it suggests that the “governator” represents the future of American politics, in which practical results will mean more to voters than partisan identity.
Record spending, deficits, tax increases
What a difference 18 months makes. Now we know what “postpartisanship” and “practical results” really mean: massive tax increases supposedly to pay for the record deficits caused by massive increases in government waste.
For years, I’ve been predicting that Gov. Arnold would increase taxes. Now, he’s sure been giving it the old bodybuilder try, as I’ve been recording.
And Bloomberg is raising NY City taxes.
So, how different are they from NY State Gov. Paterson, a leftist Democrat, who just called for jacking up taxes a record amount?
Answer: They’re no different.
Just leftist Democrats
Bloomberg originally was a liberal Democrat. He only “became” a Republican to avoid a tough Democratic primary battle.
Schwarzenegger originally squawked like an elephant, and was friends with the late, free-market Nobel economist Milton Friedman. But he’s married to a Kennedy. And although he poses as a macho tough-guy, he’s actually the most uxorious politician I’ve ever seen, adopting her leftist-Democratic family’s politics and even appointing her cronies to top government positions.
He’s also adopted the Kennedy family’s obsession with destroying the economy through extreme environmentalism, especially fighting a nonexistent “global warming” by regulating businesses to death.
In particular during recessions, such as the deep one we’re wallowing in, tax increases don’t work. They chase away taxpayers and jobs.
Bush’s leftism hid Arnold-Bloomberg leftism
For several years, Arnold and Bloomberg’s leftism was hidden by Republican President Bush’s own leftism — his No Child Left Behind (actually written by Sen. Teddy Kennedy, Arnold’s uncle) takeover of American schools, promotion of socialized medicine, inflation, record deficit spending, record debt, and Wilsonian foreign hyper-interventionism. But Bush now is a non-factor, and will be gone in a month, leaving us to look directly at Bloomberg and Arnold.
What we now see is what “postpartisanship” means: people fleeing the tyranny of extremely large and intrusive government like Vietnamese boat people.
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