A Whole Lot More Grease Needed

Yesterday I chronicled...or, rather, relayed the chronicling of the beginnings of fiscal repentence from the House Republican leadership. But I also added this caveat:

That's damn near astonishing, considering where the House GOP leadership was a scant month ago (and where, to be sure, its Senate counterpart still is, with Dems waiting behind them with filibusters at the ready, so it probably isn't as "tangible" as we would hope, but even this much repentance is tremendous progress).

Brendan Miniter brings this home today in the Wall Street Journal:

[W]hat seems to be confounding the Republican Party as a whole is a coherent and broad-based plan to shrink the size of government by controlling spending. Targeted or across-the-board cuts are great - and hopefully appreciated by conservatives for the difficulty in achieving them - but without constant scrutiny and "congressional oversight," such measures won't hold the line on spending in the long run. Once a new Congress or a new administration is seated, all bets are off.

Even with scrutiny it's more likely than not that the cost of "entitlement" programs - Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the like - will continue to grow apace and consume ever larger portions of the budget....Conservatives are noticeably frustrated with Republicans in Congress because there appears to be no plan on the table or even under development to head off such an entitlement driven eventuality....

[M]ore than a few Republicans - particularly in the Senate - ....don't understand why Americans voted the party into power in the first place.

Fiscal policy is but one sticking point among many that has finally brought the pot of conservative discontent with the GOP establishment - and the Bush White House - to a high rolling boil. So writes Bruce Bartlett today - you know, the former Reagan and Bush41 Administration official and now former senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, who was cashiered for writing a soon to be published book entitled The Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

Looks like the Night of the Bush Long Knives has arrived at last.

Be careful out there - for as long as you can afford to.