Joe Scarborough, sounding like he may have the courage, and the reason, to run in 2012: "For the past two decades, I have spent my public life obsessing about America’s coming debt crisis"

If Joe Scarborough sits this one out, he'll regret it for the rest of his life.  And America will suffer the consequence.

If he runs, he wins. And he gets to take on the problem president after president after president after president hasn't had the courage to address.

Courage.  That's it.  Soon, we'll see if Joe Scarborough has courage, or whether he's just another GOP empty suit, in it for the money.  

I bet on courage.  I bet on Joe.

Finally, confronting the debt crisis


For the past two decades, I have spent my public life obsessing about America’s coming debt crisis.

When I first ran for Congress in 1994, my campaign was obsessively focused on the national debt. In 1995, I attacked Bill Clinton for refusing to endorse a seven-year plan to balance the budget. I voted to shut down the government. I refused to support raising the debt ceiling to $5 trillion. It now stands at $14 trillion. I was attacked by Newt Gingrich in 1998 for being a member of the “perfectionist caucus” because the speaker threw in his lot with Democrats such as Dave Obey to jam through bloated spending bills. And I was with the small group of conservatives who told Gingrich to lead as a conservative or get out of town.

I spent the next decade criticizing my own Republican Party for its shamelessness on government spending. During the Bush era, many GOP members would campaign as small government conservatives and then spend their time in Washington breaking every spending promise they made to voters back home.

The $155 billion surplus we built up in 2001 became a $1.4 trillion deficit by the end of the Bush years. The overall national debt was doubled. A $7 trillion liability was added to America’s bloated entitlement system. Two wars were fought, two tax cuts were passed, defense spending exploded at record rates and domestic spending grew at its fastest rate since the Great Society.

Republican presidents, senators, congressmen and party hacks hated me for exposing them as the hypocrites they were. I preached the doctrine of moral equivalency because, for too long, there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Well, it looks like that 10-year-old sermon topic is about to change. And it’s about damn time.

The era of Big Government conservatism is over.