No mistake about it. We are in crisis mode. No matter what the stock market or the boys knocking down millions on Wall Street say…we are in an economic crisis. And we are in a political crisis.
We have trillions of debt that we need to pay off. We owe about $12.8 trillion of which about $4.2 trillion is owed to other governments. Of the amount owed to the American people, it was borrowed by the government to spend on an $680 billion defense budget (do you feel safer?) and essentials like literally keeping some of our elderly alive through Social Security and Medicare, and the poor through Medicaid.
But we have a $14 trillion economy. Right now, thanks to the Bush-Cheney Administration, a government that was on the path to hi-tech leadership in the world became a series of loosely affiliated often backward states. In one case, a man is leading for the governorship, not in spite of  denying evolution, but because he denies evolution! We have state legislation to allow guns in church!
Blind stupidity is being rewarded in many states because of a bunch of uneducated hicks. In another state, a governor has declared that anyone who looks like he or she might be a Mexican illegal alien will be stopped, searched and if they cannot prove that they are American, be sent off to some kind of detention until they can prove citizenship. But…at its core…is it really the governor’s fault?
Yes, it may be a stupid idea, but it is a stupid idea that comes out of frustration. We could solve the illegal alien problem in 24-hours. But Republicans who formerly had the chance to do something meaningful with the Bush immigration program politicized it and now they are doing even more obstruction to the Obama policy.
They talked a good game about shutting down the border, but they only partially build a wall. Some say it was a waste of money. But only Obama has tripled the border patrols and INS people…while conducting two wars and in a deep recession. Even that has not been enough. And yet Senator McCain from Arizona is now playing politics instead of leading the Senate Republicans out of obstruction and into some kind of rational immigration policy which he formerly promoted.
That is not new. The United States Senate cannot get anything done. The Neoconservatives in the Senate have filibustered over 100 times to block any kind of legislation. Every single Republican Senator should be driven from office and not allowed to run for office ever again. If you are only in office to serve the people who give you the largest campaign contributions…and that is the truth…then get out and stay out.
We have a President who is appeasing these clowns. The Neocons are represented by a political hack like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, or a worn-out old Redneck of the worst kind from Tennessee, Senator Lamar Alexander, a corporate pandering sloth, and then the worst possible gagging type of image, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a foul blight on the history of the Senate. He almost literally cannot speak a complete sentence without telling a lie.
With more than 300 bills passed by the House languishing in the Senate, dozens of judicial and administrative appointments blocked, the Neocons are ruining our country at a time when 20 million people are out of work and many millions have run out of unemployment insurance.
There is an alternative energy bill being blocked. It could create five million jobs and begin the process of doing what Boone Pickens has suggested…get us off of Arab oil before it destroys us and get us on to abundant American natural gas and other sources of energy over time. But the big oil companies are paying of the Neocon Senators and the Limbaughs are lying to the people and making up lies out of whole cloth to make the President the obstructionist.
The Neocons, one can only surmise…there is no other answer…want to impoverish the middle class and take us back to pre-1900 America where there was no middle class. There were 60-hour work weeks, enormously rich industrialists who could shut down plants and lay off workers for a week or a year or more at the drop of a hat. Where miners could be intimidated by beatings or having their houses shot up by strike breakers while the local authorities looked the other way. (Not so far from Massey coal mining in 2010.)
We have about 1900 Right Wing radio propagandists working on the same script every day. About 50 million Americans get their information on politics through media that simply…plainly…clearly…lies to them and they are so lazy or bigoted or stupid that they listen and believe the rotten, foul lies that are spewed forth by the likes of the hundreds of Hannities, Limbaughs, Coulters, Becks, Hewitts, Malkins, Norths, Liddys, Palins, and others who express their anti-middle class rhetoric that turns truth on its head.
On May 9, 2007, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney issued NSPD-51, the “National Security and Homeland Presidential Directive” another Bush-Cheney, semi-secret directive, issued without notice to the press or public. This directive said that when the President decides that there is a “catastrophic emergency” he can create a National Security Coordinator who, under the President’s guidance, will take over all government functions at all levels and direct all private activity. In other words, martial law.
But not one commentator on the Right ever mentioned it, ever took notice of it. They probably thought that it would be enacted. It is what they want. They don’t want a Democratic society. Rush Limbaugh does not run a radio program for the great unwashed. He couldn’t sell enough radio commercials in a hundred years to pay him the $400 million he makes.
Limbaugh and others are paid by huge Right Wing corporate interests to create antagonism and unrest among the several million ignorant boobs who listen every day. They repeat the lies to their fellow boobs who don’t listen to Limbaugh or Hannity or Beck or anyone except the next person on the next bar stool..
Contrast the secret rule just mentioned, the lies of Cheney and Rumsfeld (Bush is too stupid and lazy to have been involved) sending troops to Iraq, and the secret energy meeting with all the oil men in the White House just days after Bush and Cheney took office with Obama’s policies. That one meeting between Cheney and the energy CEOs resulted in legislation literally being written by some ENRON executives who had just looted California and who would later be convicted of fraud.
It resulted in lax drilling legislation and oversight that has resulted in an oil spill that may ruin the coastlines of several states in this country as well as 40% of our seafood for as long as 30 years. And it gave early evidence of the Bush-Cheney plan to go into Iraq, come hell or high water.
And by contrast, what did Obama do? He came into office on an inauguration speech and other post-election speeches that said he wanted the Republicans to be part of his administration. He put key Republicans in key positions, including the Secretary of Defense. He brought key Republicans to the White House for meetings on health care and global warming and the two wars.
Over the objections of virtually every living Democrat and Independent, he pandered to the Republicans by inserting tax breaks that accomplished absolutely nothing into the Stimulus Bill. It took up about one-third of the space that could have been used for more jobs. He brought in pro-business and pro-Wall Street advisors to try to stimulate the private economy.
The Republicans stated from day one that they would not participate in any way in government. Senator DeMint said that they would destroy the Obama administrative agenda. That was their goal. In the meantime, they sent out word…we know because we have the memos…to Fox News and others to take the Obama agenda and lie about it. They told the Right Wing radio and television commentators exactly what to say. Suddenly, idiotic commentary about “Communism” and “Socialism” have become the ridiculous fare for Fox News channels and even the once-respected Wall Street Journal.
The Republican Party is so confident in the ignorance, the racism and the mendacity of the American people that they do not even bother to hide these things. Memos from Roger Ailes on how to treat “the news” to make their points have been leaked and published in newspapers and on blogs. It is not that the Republicans do not understand the difference between Communism and Capitalism, and between a Socialist system that is 80% government run versus our system, in which government activity is 12% of GDP. They know but they lie. They work for big corporations, not the People.
Only time will tell if some of the people now following a Right Wing agenda so severe that it just tossed out perhaps its most Conservative Senator in a Republican primary will wake up. They clearly do not understand that a Republican government would work against them. They have been made to forget that the Great Recession came under Bush’s administration. They have forgotten that the Republicans took us to war in Iraq for no good reason and cost us 4,500 American lives and about $1 trillion more debt. They forget that it was Republicans who tried–and are trying again–to kill Social Security. It was the Republicans who fought against the stinking, pitiful minimum $7.25/hour minimum wage and wanted to keep it at $5.00/hour.
The Republicans are now Neocons. You cannot be an old-time Republican, a Taft or a Teddy Roosevelt or an Eisenhower. You must be a hate-filled, gun-toting, anti-abortion, pro-fundamentalist, superstitious, anti-science, anti-education, anti-diplomacy, war monger and hillbilly to be a Republican. You have to consider that someone like Sarah Palin, a moron, could be your next Presidential candidate. You must want this country to be the laughing stock of the world if you want to be a good Republican these days.
