John G. Taft's evasive honesty

What a peculiar exercise in moral exhortation. John G. Taft rather bravely excoriates the recklessness and cruelty of the current Cruzified GOP in the name of the party's grand old traditions of responsible governance and fiscal probity-- presumably embodied in "Five generations of Tafts [who] have served our nation as unwaveringly stalwart Republicans." And yet he does so by invoking the party's -- and his family's -- past shame: its collusion with Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt. Taft manages to be refreshingly honest and subtly evasive all at once.

Taft levels his attack against Ted Cruz & co. in the name of his grandfather:

As I write, a photograph of my grandfather, Senator Robert Alphonso Taft, looks across at me from the wall of my office. He led the Republican Party in the United States Senate in the 1940s and early 1950s, ran for the Republican nomination for president three times and was known as “Mr. Republican.” If he were alive today, I can assure you he wouldn’t even recognize the modern Republican Party, which has repeatedly brought the United States of America to the edge of a fiscal cliff — seemingly with every intention of pushing us off the edge.

Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do — position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.

"The adults in the room" -- except with respect to one little issue that is the focus of Taft's historical analogy: