We now know what the Republicans want. Not the Tea Party members. They are merely dupes.
Yes, dupes. If you are concerned about government spending you don’t rail at the Party that cut spending for 8 years, even going so far as to take hit after hit in the Congressional elections. So many House of Representatives members bit the bullet to cut spending for Bill Clinton and Al Gore that there was almost a revolt in the Democratic Party.
Later, Bill Clinton acknowledged the best and bravest of the House members who had been castigated and demonized by Republicans in off-year elections while at the same time also voting to cut any kind of appropriations to Democratic districts. The Republican Senate was only too happy to cut spending while spending almost all their time investigating a non-existent scandal over Whitewater and then anything that they could find until they found Monica Lewinsky.
Generations ago, Monica Lewinsky would have been a non-issue, never even brought up. But today, the Neocon Republicans have become less an American Party and more of a Communist or a Fascist Party. While New Gingrich was having an affair with his secretary in secret in his office, he was going to the well of the House to attack Clinton and his affair with Monica Lewinsky and shouting for Impeachment!
So why are the Tea Party members dupes? Here is why. When and if Republicans control anything…House of Representatives or Senate, here is what they will do….none of which is good for average citizens, which is what most of these zombie-like morons seem to be.
1. They will Impeach the President and begin almost unlimited number of frivolous investigations to stop government from functioning. They have already said that they will take the flimsiest of excuses and turn it into an Impeachment hearing. Americans will see through it, you say? Not likely. The Republicans have unlimited money to do whatever they want. Sharron Angle, one of the least qualified and nuttiest candidates every to run for Senate has received $15 million from Republican corporate-lobbyist types from outside Nevada. So 51 Republican Senators is all they need, plus the money to run advocacy ads on television day after day, hour after hour.
You can count on it. The Republicans remember how they tried to shut down government completely and did so for two years in the late 1990s. They don’t like government they like to have corporations run things, and Wall Street run things and lobbyists run things. The childish, super-wealthy, dilettante politician from California, Darrell Issa has already said that if he becomes head of any committee he will immediately initiate “investigations.” Republicans will do anything to protect their wealthy billionaire brethren from legislation that might help the average American worker.
2. They will try to undo Health Care Reform. The health care lobby gave over $500 million to the Republicans to defeat good, solid reform of the disastrous policies of the health care industry.The greatest assistance, a bountiful gift to the health insurance business, has been the Tea Party movement. What the health insurance industry needed was to get someone to change the subject and to find numbskulls who for some unknown reason think that they are immune to the millions of cases of people who are denied care or dropped from care when they get sick.
The strongest evidence of the success of the anti-health care reform movement is in the fact that many Democratic politicians are running against it because they could not break through the barrage of lies. The health care industry, having lost in Congress, i.e., to the People, has now spent more hundreds of millions on Right Wing commentators like Limbaugh, Beck and “Banned in Britain” revoltingly crude commentator, Michael Savage to spread anti-health reform propaganda.
The Tea Party people who parroted the health insurance industry message simply do not have enough brains nor education to understand the situation. They don’t realize the impact of 15% to 20% increases in premiums per year on families. They ignore the fact that a very high percentage of people are actually denied care who did, in fact, pay premiums. They will sink their teeth into a UFO conspiracy, yet not wonder about an industry full of CEOs averaging $14 million a year, every year, who are using them to continue to collect outrageous incomes from excess profits.
Health insurance reform will, if left in place and not disturbed, increasingly expand coverage, reduce costs, and offer the same kind of security for health care that those on those few currently really good systems, like the government’s private health care system or the Medicare system or the Veterans’ Administration system. Hopefully, one day when the health insurance industry’s lobbying power is lessened, we will add a public option. That will mean that only non-profit companies, such as those private companies in Germany and Switzerland, dedicated not to profits but to the best possible service will remain.
3. They will try to cut taxes for the rich and increase national debt. This should not be a surprise. If it isn’t clear by now that the Republicans want to bankrupt the government, then what evidence does anyone want. In 1980, the debt was less than a trillion dollars. After Reagan, Bush I and Bush II it is now $13 Trillion.
It was $5 trillion when George W. Bush took office, with a surplus left from Bill Clinton. Bush and Cheney then spent $6 trillion in 8 years, and then left an economy in which jobs were being lost at the rate of 700,000 a month. In the last 9 months of the Bush Administration, an already bad job market, jumped from 7% to over 10%. Obama finally, after a huge battle, initiated a stimulus that created 3 million jobs while 500,000 were being lost a month. Finally, the combination of stimulus and government cuts at all levels, federal, state and local, and the private sector, stabilized.
By the time the bleeding could be stopped, it was a year into the Obama Administration. $300 billion a year had been lost by the Bush Recession layoffs, plus another $300 billion in government outlays for unemployment insurance, food stamps and other actions normal to a Recession. But the Bush leftover deficit was already $1.8 trillion and President Obama’s first budget, including the $800 billion stimulus, was $1.4 trillion.
Even the 3 million jobs CBO says were created by the stimulus was not enough. Bush, in fact, tried to bankrupt the country. He took the hands off the reins of government and let the bankers and the military contractors and the health care lobby and the international corporations loot the people. He even tried to take away Social Security but with Senator John Kerry leading the way, the Democrats wouldn’t let him. Of course, the endless, bottomless source of Right Wing lies on as many as 5,000 radio stations continues to try to bring down the government for the Koch Family and the Waltons, and the oil industry-Arab cartel.
If the Republicans are elected, they will create, through tax breaks that they have already announced, another $4 trillion in debt. Bush gave families with incomes of $1,000,000 per year a $120,000 tax break over their current average annual tax expenditure (not the published rate, but what they actually end up paying) of 23%. If those are renewed, it will be $2trillion to them and another $2 trillion loss to government already $13 trillion in debt…all of that already the fault of the Conservatives and Neoconservatives.
4. They will continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increase military spending. They claim, of course, that they want to end these wars. But they do not. Their biggest constituents are military contractors. They have no intention of ending those wars. The people of Afghanistan and of Iraq are not fellow human beings to Republicans. Americans are not even human beings to Republicans or they would abandon their attacks on the minimum wage and on health care reform. Both George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been heavily involved in creating more contracts for the military industrial complex.
Bush I started the first Gulf War (with which most of us agreed) then co-founded the military contractor, The Carlyle Group. Cheney left office under Bush I as Secretary of Defense and immediately took his military contracts to Halliburton which he turned into one of the world’s largest military contractors. Suffice to say, hard core Republicans all follow Cheney’s lead. He had not and never will repent for putting personal greed over the lives of what he considers sub-humans…all of us who do not slavishly follow or agree with his Fascist policies.
5. They will send more jobs abroad and create no new jobs here. The Republican Party is controlled by very large international corporations, including very large oil and coal and natural gas corporations. They do not want domestic employment because they can continue to sell products to the 90% of the people who are still employed. They are satisfied with a smaller domestic market because they can continue to operate here in the United States, pay no taxes, pay top executives huge salaries and bonuses, keep others constantly in fear of losing their jobs and reduce the wages of those who do have jobs. This is an attempt to return to the early 1900s, days of poverty and disease and control by enormously wealthy moguls. The difference today is that the Tea Party members are so numb to reality that they do not know what they are causing.
6. They will try to repeal Roe vs. Wade and continue “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The Neoconservative Republican Party has become the “Anti-gay” Party. And they still want to oblige women to go into back alleys if they must choose between abortion and death. Not only that but the religious wing of the Neocon Party wants to teach some Christian version of history in schools, and not merely in Texas schools, where education is mostly about being a cheerleader or a football player. They want to teach some idiotic form of science in tandem with regular science. The idea that “Intelligent Design,” the nonsense that the Religious Right likes to pawn off as science is educating our children is ridiculous and wastes a great deal of time for students who, in many cases, like mathematics, are dead last in the world rankings,
Has anyone ever wondered about true justice in America? Forget that it is the United States. Just think of it as a country. The country is founded by a group of mostly very well meaning, clearly very bright, very independent and entrepreneurial individuals. But as they expand, they bring in slaves from Africa. In this country, those slaves are not just indentured servants. They are beaten, whipped, raped, chained, hanged and prevented under pain of severe punishment from any kind of education. Treated, literally, like farm animals. Now get this. After several hundred years they are free and living among the people who brought them to this hypothetical country by force…involuntarily.
Are they treated better for having been treated so miserably for a couple of hundred years? No. They are not allowed to drink or eat or even relieve themselves in the same locations as White European-descended citizens. They are given either no education or a second-class education. Not only do citizens not apologize to them for having done all this, but they are terrorized and persecuted merely because they are dark-skinned and the product of animal-like treatment for 300 years.
So let’s see what the KKK-approving Southern politicians believe. Because these are the leaders…the Shelbys, Sessions, DeMints, Lotts, Chambliss, Cornyns, Kyls, and Vitters. They want you to believe that all our social network problems, the costs, the crime, the prisons, the bottomless pit of education-related costs with little result…because it is still too little to solve the problem…are the fault–not of their predecessors–who were the people in the example who caused the slavery, the beatings, the chains, the hangings–but the fault of the people who were enslaved, beaten, whipped, and given no education.
And no one to this day has made a meaningful effort to create a full-scale program to raise this under-class up to the level of the rest of society. Because one man can run faster or jump higher or because one genius out of every ten thousand people can break through the hard crust of society’s resrictions to become successful, it does not mean that the problem is solved or that anyone has even attempted to solve the problem.
The problem is that the Neoconservative Republican Party has adopted the tacit, never-spoken, surreptitious philosophy of blaming the victims for all the problems, and then welcoming those who hate the victims. The Neocons have taken on the mantle of their predecessors, the Dixiecrat Wing of the Democratic Party created in the 19th and 20th Century. They left the Democratic Party when Lyndon Johnson said…”enough”…and Civil Rights for all became law, and when Ronald Reagan later said, “enough help for blacks” after less than 20 years of affirmative action.
But let’s go back to our theoretical country. The founders come to a new land, and encourage more settlers. But there are already people living in this country, and after being pushed off their land, after a while, they fight back. They turn out to be very good guerilla fighters and they do a pretty good job of defending large segments of their land. But the settlers come in overwhelming numbers, bringing guns and cannons and all kinds of sophisticated weaponry. The native population is forced to large land areas. But when those land areas are discovered to be more valuable than was thought, the treaties that stopped the fighting and gave the natives those lands are abrogated and they are moved to new land areas, not so valuable.
They are given no education, no respect and isolated for 100 years after the fighting stops. Then a handful of well-fed, well-educated, well-meaning members of the new population steps up and says that something should be done for these people. But guess what? Nothing happens. As the modern era of the late 20th and early 21st Century dawns, they are given Casinos. But these are basically run by a handful of political people, with management taking huge fees. Then two things happen. A man goes to jail for cheating these same people out of between $70 million and $100 million to try to–once again–negotiate with the Federal government. But once again they are cheated.
At the same time, while these natives of this country are living on their allotted land, it turns out that they have some huge natural resources. So, since they are legally “sovereign nations” within the land where they used to own everything, the Federal government again negotiates a deal to pay them royalties if they will let oil companies and mining companies extract these resources. They do, and billions of dollars of royalties are created. Yes, “created” but never paid. The companies simply never paid the royalties and the federal government which was responsible did nothing to help the natives. And so the government now owes them billions on billions of dollars which has never been paid.
Well, you’ve probably guessed by now, that this country, too, is the United States. Yes, we are the country where our great grandfathers enslaved, cheated, whipped, killed, drove off their lands all these “inferior” people. And now, guess what folks. Now the great American Middle Class is the new prey. We are now the “inferiors.” And those arrogant, cocky Tea Party candidates, those arrogant, cocky, rude, classless, tasteless radio commentators on those 5,000 stations? They are the new land agents, the new slave masters of an upcoming takeover. It happened in Germany and Italy in the early 1930s and in Spain in the late 1930s and in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s through the 1980s. It can happen here, if you don’t get out and vote.
The haters always use disguises. Hitler was not a majority Chancellor. But when he got control of the media, he told his audiences just what we hear today…how bad all the other politicians are and how all the other countries are out to get us. And how he will fix everything. And remember this. They didn’t start with concentration camps. They started by putting in all their own Nazi Party judges. So when they sent people off to the concentration camps at first, it was all done “legally.”
It can happen here. Just ask ex-Governor Siegelman of Alabama who went to prison on “legal” trumped up charges. He stayed there until years of legal work could get him freed. Yes, it can happen here if Karl Rove gets back in power.
Make sure you let everyone know..everyone you can influence…that a President who delivers the good and the bad news is preferable to one who lies…and saves the big, bad news…that he is taking over…for after the election.
At some point, when the Neocons have seen to it that their judges are all on the Supreme Court, and their funding sources, the big international corporations have no restrictions at all, and when the U.S. attorneys in all 50 states are Karl Rove stooges…and when the election equipment is all made and controlled by the Republicans…and when Blackwater, now Ze, merges with some of the larger, growing White supremacist militias, and work for the Republican Party, they will be free to tell you the truth. This is no longer a Democracy, they will say. It was a nice idea, but it was too expensive.
