GOP flunks its own history test

By: Roger Simon
Political.com
May 26, 2011 04:38 AM EDT

Quick, who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”?

If you said it was the Spanish philosopher George Santayana writing in 1905, you are wrong.

It is actually the motto of the Republican Party in 2011.

It was a blazingly hot day in West Palm Beach, Fla., six weeks before the presidential election of 1996, and Bob Dole was boiling mad. Florida had gone Republican in presidential elections for 20 years, 40 percent of the vote was controlled by seniors and Dole was definitely a Republican senior. But the polls showed him losing the state to Bill Clinton.

Why? Medicare. The Democrats had spent $4 million in ads telling people that Bob Dole would end Medicare as they knew it. Dole had gone to an elderly center; and after his talk, a lady in a wheelchair had asked him, “Why are you cutting my Medicare?”

(More here.)