The things that make me laugh…
On Sunday's "Face the Nation," conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks said, quite accurately, that the current incarnation of the Republican Party was "in a world of pain," because the party is "just a circular firing squad with everybody attacking each other and no coherent belief system, no leaders. … you have half the party waiting for Sarah Palin to come rescue them, the other half waiting for Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, to come rescue them. But no set of beliefs, really a decayed conservative infrastructure."
He has to be kidding with this.
If there is one thing the Republican Party has had over the last 28 years, it's a leadership, and a very strong belief system. The reason the Republican Party is in a "world of pain" is because their leadership and their belief system have been morally reprehensible, and ethically challenged bastardizations of what the United States is supposed to be about, and strangely, the people don't really care for that sort of thing.
Let's start with their leadership. It's roughly the same as it has been for a generation; corrupt bastards who hate everyone who isn't rich, and think they're entitled to be in power because it's their turn. It's difficult to name a Republican leader in the last 30 years who hasn't been forced to resign or "retire" because of some sort of scandal, and even those who weren't involved in a specific scandal supported others who were. I mean, can you even imagine a Democrat outing a CIA agent and other Democrats letting him get away with it? Yeah, me either. And how corrupt must your leadership be to run against the sins of the other party, and then commit the same sins, and even build upon them, when you take power?
And the douchebags leading the Republican Party over the last 30 years had a very clear agenda, and one that even a relatively respectable conservative like David Brooks held his nose and supported. They tried to hide their agenda by adopting words and phrases that would have made Josef Goebbels proud, but the agenda was available for all to see, if anyone bothered to look.
Their main agenda was simple, in part because their constituency, such as it was, was made up largely of brain-dead morons, who wouldn't have understood anything that actually made sense. Here's the agenda, in a nutshell.
- Undo as much of the New Deal as possible.
- To kill "entitlement programs" such as Social Security and Medicare, and funnel the money to contributors to their campaign.
- Their major premise was that government is inherently too incompetent to do much of anything right, and they had to prove it so. (Think Hurricane Katrina)
- Cut taxes and increase payments to the richest Americans, while at the same time making the poor and working class work so hard just to survive, that they wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
- To "starve the beast." By reducing the amount of money coming into the Treasury, and burying the country under a mountain of debt, they could simultaneously prove the government incompetent and -- I kid you not -- permanently reduce taxes on the rich. (Logic was never the right's strong suit.)
- Eliminate the Middle Class, and create an oligarchy, in which 99% of the country was completely dependent on the other 1% for their family's survival.
And if you think I'm exaggerating, consider the following:
- Over the last 30 years, hasn't the Republican Party effectively killed a large number of regulations at the heart of the schema designed to prevent another Great Depression? One of the last vestiges was the Glass-Steagall Act, which the Republicans killed once and for all in 1999. And remember the Sherman Act? Why have they stopped enforcing that to any great degree?
- Did the Republican Party, or did they not try to turn Social Security into a market-based activity, and did they, or did they not tack an unwieldy prescription drug program onto Medicare, purposely forbidding any price controls for said drugs?
- Why did the Bush Administration feel absolutely justified in giving almost every major government position to unqualified cronies, if their intent was not to demonstrate the incompetence of government? Why were most White House lawyers during the Bush Administration kid lawyers from Pat Robertson's hack law school, and barely qualified to practice law with a real firm, let alone work for the people in the government?
- Didn't the rich get almost all of the tax breaks during the last 30 years, while taxes for the poor and working classes went up? Why is it the only taxes Republicans cut are income, corporate and estate taxes? Why do they never even discuss reductions in payroll taxes? And why, when they had control of all branches of government for almost all of six years, did they cut federal student aid drastically, at the same time they were giving tax money to oil companies and other large corporations?
- If they weren't "starving the beast," then explain all of the deficit spending? When the neocon era began in 1981, the national debt was barely $1 trillion. Now, 28 years later, it's topped $10 trillion, even after a short period in which Bill Clinton guilted them into balancing the budget. They keeep expanding government size, expanding government power, and expanding government spending, at the same time they keep reducing the revenue stream.
- And isn't it obvious that they have planned all along to kill the middle class and create an oligarchy? Why is it now almost impossible for a family to live on one income these days? Why has the minimum wage not kept up with inflation? Why have they done everything possible to suppress union recruitment and membership? Why have they encouraged the level of personal debt in this country? Everything they have done for the last 28 years, and especially the last eight, has been designed to funnel money from the poor to the rich. Now, why do that, if your intent is not to cede power from the majority of working people, to a small minority of extremely rich people?
David Brooks is absolutely wrong. The reason the Republican Party is in a "world of pain" is because Americans figured out what they were really up to, and all but a few right wing morons -- those who are too brain dead to figure out that abortion is a right, that gays get married every day, and there's nothing they can do to stop it, and that no one wants to take their goddamn squirrel rifle , and who think George Bush is the shit -- don't like that agenda.
Face it; parties without an agenda lose by the electoral votes in one state. What's killing the Republican Party right now IS their agenda.
Time to tell the wingnuts to pack it in and take it elsewhere. Put them back in the margins, where they belong.
