Shorter GOP: concern for national deficit or for crunch on nation's middle class = "class warfare"

Another cross-posting from comments to The Fix - if there's one trope I can't stand that I haven't said anything about yet, it's the GOP rhetoric that any opposition to their squeezing out the middle class and grinding the nation's finances into the most ludicrous debt in the history of the world, is "class warfare". Jeez. Real class warfare in the 1800's meant French peasants and servants taking up arms against the aristocrats and both slaughtering each other - kind of like actual "warfare". But naturally the same people who insist the sectarian bloodbath in Iraq "is not a civil war!" have no problem slinging around rhetoric of "class warfare" to shut down any debate on Congress's feverish addiction to filling out every credit card offer they get for another Great Big Bank of China Credit Card.

Who's actually waging class warfare while casting blame elsewhere, as opposed to being blamed for it? The Bush-GOP Congress team has done more damage to the U.S. Gini coefficient than at any time since George III, thanks in large part to tax breaks overwhelmingly tilted to the highest incomes coupled with a deficit-fueled decline of the dollar and passing on the tax burden to the states with unfunded mandates, and in large part to this GOP crew's fervent practice of cronyist economics as opposed to actual free market capitalism - how many hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars have they doled out to their good buddies among the wealthiest few through sweetheart corporate welfare tax breaks, no-bid contracts, federal land natural resource extraction leases at pennies on the market value dollar, and federally legislated windfalls for big pharma (medicare part D) and wall street (privatized social security, they hope) - right down to the ludicrous tax avoidance / wealth transfer scam of Barbara Bush earmarking a "charitable donation" to be funneled to Neil Bush's Ignite software company by way of the Katrina (Slush) Fund.

That is the difference between the classically liberal free market economics of Adam Smith and of the U.S. laissez-faire conservative tradition, as opposed to the wealth-accumulation-by-government (i.e. central planning economics) of the current GOP, who have gone full circle in their economic philosophy back to what was considered "conservative" in Adam Smith's day - for the lion's share of economic rewards to be doled out by diktat to the nobles and the king's other buddies in the form of royally granted monopolies, import patents, and sinecures. Sound familiar?

The reality is, the economic policy that emerged from Clinton-Gore and a less extremist GOP Congress forced to work together was a thousand times more faithful to free market capitalism than the disastrous all-GOP Bush/extremist-Congress team has been.