Mutually-exclusive takes on conservative failure

The Hill:

Rep. Mary Fallin (R-Okla.) says President Obama’s budget, the details of which will be released today, is tantamount to “taxation without representation.”

In an op-ed today, Fallin argues that because Obama’s budget will result in a deficit, it amounts to a tax on future generations, who are not currently represented in Congress.

“These taxpayers, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, haven’t been born yet. So they are not being represented today,” she wrote. “That’s taxation without representation of the worst kind.”

TMV pushes back:

Unless someone is a registered Republican, or fan of Rush Limbaugh and other talk show hosts, this is a weak argument. The bottom line: in elections one side wins and one side loses. For 8 years the Bush administration ballooned government spending — and I am not talking about during the financial meltdown but way before last fall.

Republicans weren’t talking about future generations and taxation without representation then. Why? Because it was their “sports team” that had the ball.

First of all, let's be clear that what makes this weak is not the argument itself, but the people making it. For instance, Karl Rove famously said "deficits don't matter". That was early in Bush's term when Republicans were busy doing all their own newly veto-proof spending.

Clearly Republicans are being hypocritical now, and that's why those tea parties made for very weak tea. But the arguments themselves are not weak. Obama's long-term deficits are a terrible thing that conceals the need to raise taxes in the future for medium-term political gain. That's dishonest and harmful. (Yglesias agrees on this, except he takes the pro-tax+spend position) So when I employ the same solid (I think) anti-spending arguments as Republicans, the difference between me and Republican hacks is that I have employed them consistently, regardless of which party was in power and doing the spending.

That said, the main point I want to make here is that all the above is inconsistent with the claim that fiscal conservatism, capitalism, and freer markets are failed ideas. If Republicans have been hypocritical, then these things have only been furthered in Republican rhetoric.

There are two mutually-exclusive possibilities. Either:

1) Republicans did govern conservatively, and their genuine conservative solutions failed.
2) Republicans stopped governing conservatively ("lost their way"), and genuine conservative economic principles haven't been operative for the last decade.

You cannot claim, as the left would like to do, that both:

3) Republican ideas are a failure and Republicans are hypocrites.

Admittedly, this is a little too neat. Perhaps half their ideas have been a failure, and the other half were hypocritically untested, or some other proportion.

We can haggle over that proportion. We just can't think that something like 90%+ of Republican ideas are a failure and 90%+ are hypocritical.

Either they mostly did what they professed to believe and it mostly failed, or they were hypocritical, didn't do it, and maybe deserve another chance some day in the future when they can convince us they're sincere (which will certainly take some doing).