Good to see that the Senate’s feckless support for the President’s helot-importing/wage-depressing mass immigration scheme is getting the blame it deserves for some of the GOP’s woes from Brother Frum, but this comment from William Kristol (if quoted accurately: we are talking the NY Times here) defies all belief: “[Kristol] doubted that soaring spending was turning off as many voters as tax-cutters like Mr. Norquist or Mr. Armey suggested….’The spending bill that was supposedly going to destroy the Republican Party was the Medicare drug bill,’ he said. ‘I have heard almost no one talk about it one way or the other.’

Mr. Kristol misses the point. The Medicare drug bill stirs up problems, principally, for the future, other than for those unlucky enough to be caught in that infamous doughnut. The spending that is causing the GOP most of its political problems *now* is the earmarking that has soared, unvetoed, over the last few years to an extent quite unimaginable in long, lost 1994 (Heritage has the details here). It’s that that has been an invitation to corruption (eagerly accepted by some, it seems), destroyed the reputation of the GOP for spending restraint and trashed the image of this congress beyond all repair. You can argue that the amounts involved in earmarking are relatively small (and I use that word advisedly) given the rest of the Hastert-Frist spending binge, but their *symbolic* impact has been devastating.

As for Mr. Kristol’s idea that “the Bush administration was suffering politically for applying too little force, not too much,” I don’t even know where to begin…