History Repeating

Conservatives by their very nature make it a point to know their history and traditions. Doing so preserves what works while making sure not to repeat the same mistakes again.

Thanks to socialist liberals, we are about to repeat history.

Back in the 1930s, the Smoot-Hawley Act, a tariff against foreign goods, was passed that immediately triggered tariffs against American goods further plummeting the American economy.

Did our "friends" in Congress and the White House, crack open their history books when they wrote up their pork-fat greasy stimulus bill.

No they did not.

Here's what the inestimable Mark Stein over at NRO has to say...

And they’ve managed to goad the rest of the world into ending the Obama honeymoon in nothing flat. Headline from the London Daily Telegraph: “US-EU Trade War Looms As Barack Obama Bill Urges ‘Buy American.’ ”

That would be the provision in the Senate bill prohibiting any foreign-made goods from being used in “stimulus” projects. So, if you own a rubber plantation in Malaysia and you’re hoping for a piece of Nancy Pelosi’s condom action, forget it. The EU trade commissioner is outraged at the swaggering cowboy Obama shooting from the hip and unilaterally banning European goods from American soil. But so are American companies such as General Electric. Bill Lane, an executive honcho with Caterpillar (the tenth biggest U.S. investor in the United Kingdom), says, “We are students of history. A major reason a very deep recession turned into the Great Depression was the fact that countries turned inward.” Ah, yes. The Buy American Act of 1933. How’d that work out?

There is a famous axiom that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over but always expecting a different result.

So I ask myself this, if all the conservatives are shouting that the same mistakes are being made and liberals choose to ignore them, are they insane?

I'll bet you know my answer.