In the cool, rarefied air of Senate multi-millionaires it may be possible to conduct policy discussions with great civility. At least on the non-producing Democratic side. On the other side, the Neocon Obstructionist Party smiles, makes sarcastic comments in the legislative chamber and then votes against everything. No exaggeration. They have voted against everything by sending up 112 filibusters in one Congressional session. Even in the last session where they did the same thing, they only were able to produce less than 60 filibusters.
Then, of course, they walk out the door to spew the worst kind of vitriolic venom to the press that has absolutely no bearing on reality. They lie about the legislation itself. They lie about Democratic postures, referring to Democrats as “tax and spend.” which is actually what they have done only worse. They were the tax relief for the rich but “borrow and spend” Republicans to accomplish their goals: wars and inflationary bubbles used to cause a major recession. And the press unquestioningly prints it.
Do nothing and lie about it. Let Sean Hannity continue the lies and broadcast them to the very people who should be outraged, and would perhaps if they could find out the truth. Have Rush Limbaugh, who supposedly reaches 15 million listeners a day, demonize the opposition, calling any intelligent woman legislator a “Feminazi” which goes over well with his moronic base of Fundamentalist, keep your women barefoot-and-pregnant ditto-brained listeners.
Hannity is merely a Limbaugh wannabee. And there is no surprise that Limbaugh lies on a daily basis. Several books have been written about it, including one by a sitting Senator of the United States. But, because Limbaugh is sponsored by the very Texas oilmen who never got over losing the oil depletion allowance and, like the Texaco executives, never got over de-segregation, he cannot be removed from the airwaves. He is, of course, by any standard, a pig with apparently 15 million pig-lovers listening to his program every day.
We don’t know why people can lie and lie and lie, over and over, about very important legislation, important to the people, like health care, where a solution is sitting in the Senate chamber, and cannot reach the President’s desk. We know why it is not moving…because of $400 million spent to buy off Senators like Birch Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and of course every single Republican Senator. Even these people lie about their votes. Here’s how bad the situation has become.
Let’s take health care reform. The Neoconservative CPAC convention has begun by disavowing any association with the past at all. The last CPAC Convention, you may recall, had as its keynote speaker, Mr. Limbaugh. (Resulting in what has become the butt of the largest number of YouTube comic insults of his foolish, childish, sweaty and adolescent comments virtually ever run on the Internet.) This year’s CPAC convention started off with the group stating that they had no part in the giant spending spree by Republicans in the Bush Administration. They were apparently out of town or in a coma the whole time.
It would be just another joke at Neocon expense if it were not so serious. The idea that the same people, McCain, Limbaugh, Boehner, Cantor, Palin, Hatch, Ensign—the whole sick snarky group who gave away the country for eight year…were somehow not even there…is beyond comprehension.
They have gone so far in their lies as to say that the Republicans who ran the country into the ground, and those same Senators and Congress people, like Jerry Lewis, and Dan Burton and Judy Biggert and Marsha Blackman and Michelle Bachmann and Steven King (more gothic than Stephen King) simply were not there…is astonishingly audacious.
They must think that, more than their recognized adherence to Hitler’s “big lie” theory, an attempt to make the “biggest lie” that, namely, they simply were not there…the last 8 years never took place…will work best of all! On health care reform, they want to “start over.” As if their 160 amendments to health care reform bills in the Senate was not enough participation. (They wanted to submit 400 amendments, but that would have taken so long, and so many were redundant that the committees would never have been able to finish. Could that possibly have been done on purpose? Nah!)
We need to remember that it was the Neoconservative Republicans who voted to cut government revenues in half in the 1980s, and voted for two tax cuts for the wealthy on top of those in the 1980s, again in 2001 and 2003. They resulted in structural deficits in years 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986,1987, 1988,1989, 1990,1991,1992,1993,1994,1995,1996 and then again in 2001, 2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007…culminating in a deficit in Bush’s last year of $1.3 trillion for 2008 alone!
How long does it take to discover that you are losing between $250 and $500 billion a year? How long do you have to wonder if 19 planes hitting Saddam Hussein’s 19 palaces on the same night might kill him or at least scare him to the point of capitulation? Huh? Rather than invading with 140,000 troops, many of which were taken from the war in Afghanistan.
Does anyone recall any Neoconservative Republican commenting when Bush said, after making the decision to go to war in Iraq, when asked about Osama Bin Laden: “I’m really not too worried about Osama Bin Laden.” We started a war on top of a war and had tax cuts! Was there one brain among all those in the Republican administration? Now we want to pretend that they simply weren’t there. Like the Flying Dutchman. No one was aboard…it simply sailed itself into a maelstrom!
This is 9 years later and Osama Bin Laden is still sending people out to attack Americans! Not too worried about Osama…were you…Dubya? He was more worried about the oil under Iraq. We know that because the maps of Iraq that Dick Cheney made, dividing up the Iraqi oil fields, are available to see on the Internet.
We now have the second level of lying about the health care bill. Having been disproved before, they are going around again. According to the Neocons, it is a huge document, too big to read or understand and it is a “government takeover” of health care. Betsey McCaughey still calls it “dangerous” still lies about “death panels.” She rolled out her lobbyist-paid program again the other day. They are all paid propagandists, paid liars.
It has been a long and profitable road in politics for McCaughey. She started in the early 1990s as Republican Lieutenant Governor of New York but screwed up and was dropped from that post. So she vindictively switched to the Democrat Party. But then she discovered that, working with the tobacco companies to defeat the Clinton health care plan was more lucrative. She wrote articles that were later discovered to be peppered with lies and half truths. Now she is doing the same thing, peddling her wares for the arch-conservative Hudson Institute, attempting to shoot down the Obama health reform plan.
If the Neoconservatives and Betsey McCaughey cared about health care, which they say they do (if it pays well and then only on the other side of the issue) they and she have had more than 15 years to advocate for any kind of good policy. Never happened. Not once. The fact is that they are paid by, yes, the tobacco industry and the health insurance lobby and people like Rick Scott whose American Hospital Corporation cheated the U.S. government out of billions of dollars.
The health care plan or the stimulus plan or the green energy plan…take your pick. The Neoconservatives do not have a better idea. They have an opposing idea that they will not publish or broadcast. They have the industry position. Drill, baby, drill. Or tax cuts for the rich. They have not changed. But they continue to lie.
The stimulus has created about 600,000 jobs and saved another approximately one million jobs. This we know because of the proposed layoffs submitted to the federal government when asking for assistance early on in the recession. The 600,000 jobs are those new jobs identified on the Recovery.gov website that are there for any non-obstructionist to plainly see and count. Some of these are make-work jobs….but so what? They are jobs for people who did not have jobs, which 10 million Americans still do not have.
The only part of the stimulus was the one that this weak and compromising President and Senate offered as some kind of foolish peace offering to the brain-dead Republicans. The only part of the stimulus from which we cannot identify one single job is the Republican tax-cut measure. In trying to be bi-partisan, this lame President, who should have known in advance as he had worked with these lobbyist panderers when he was a Senator, allowed this tax cut scam to be pulled on the American public. It was merely one more con job by a bunch of anti-middle class lobbyist-paid crooked politicians.
Lies, lies, lies and more lies. That is the entire Neoconservative Republican agenda.
