Jacob Sullum - soothscribe

This comes balance what came over as an uncritical endorsement of everything that Dennis Prager wrote in NRO, when I meant only to draw attention to those parts of his article that were equally applicable to Britain.

Reason's Sullum rightly excoriates the US Republicans for their shameless opportunism in trying to surf the Tea Party wave. There is nothing remotely equivalent going on over here, so it stands simply as a corrective to the manichaean view of US politics expressed by Prager.

In the "Pledge to America" they unveiled last week, House Republicans promise they will "launch a sustained effort to stem the relentless growth in government that has occurred over the past decade." Who better for the job than the folks who ran the government for most of that time? If the GOP's record of fiscal fecklessness were not enough reason to doubt its newfound commitment to curbing "Washington’s irresponsible spending habits," the pledge's failure to address entitlement and defense programs would be.

Quite. They are all mendacious scum - but at least in the States that view is being loudly expressed by a significant part of the electorate.