Useful Idiot.

Posted July 3, 2009 at 2:10 PM

http://exurbanleague.com/2009/07/03/useful-idiot.aspx?ref=rss

Colin Powell is shocked, shocked to discover that Barack Obama is exactly who conservatives said he was last year:

Colin Powell, one of President Obama's most prominent Republican supporters, expressed concern Friday that the president's ambitious blitz of costly initiatives may be enlarging the size of government and the federal debt too much.

"I'm concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them," Mr. Powell said in an excerpt of an interview with CNN's John King, released by the network Friday morning.

Mr. Powell, a retired U.S. army general who rose to political prominence after a long and accomplished military career, said that health care reform and many of Mr. Obama's other initiatives are "important" to Americans.

But, he said, "one of the cautions that has to be given to the president -- and I've talked to some of his people about this -- is that you can't have so many things on the table that you can't absorb it all."

"And we can't pay for it all," said Mr. Powell, who was the first African-American to serve as secretary of state, under former President George W. Bush. He was also national security adviser to President Reagan, and was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993.

Why is it that so many of the "smart," "sophisticated" Republicans are so easily and repeatedly fooled, while us knuckle-dragging right-wing morons figured out Obama was a hard leftist a year before the election? To further highlight Powell's ideological befuddlement, CNN played an excerpt from Powell's 1996 speech at the Republican Convention:

"The federal government has become too large and too intrusive in our lives," Mr. Powell said then. "We can no longer afford solutions to our problems that result in more entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, more bureaucracy to run them, and fewer results to show for it."

Mr. Powell said that now that he still believes what he said then, but that he would put it in different terms now.

"I don't like slogans anymore like 'limited government.' That's not the right answer. The right answer is, give me a government that works," he said. "Keep it as small as possible. Keep the tax burden on the American people as small as possible, but at the same time, have government that is solving the problems of the people."

So he thought voting for the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate was the best way to achieve a small government and low tax rate. And they called Bush dumb?

General, you got played like a dime-store kazoo. Your belated chagrin is cold comfort for the party that you abandoned.