GDP is shriveling. Unemployment is soaring. According to McClatchey MBAs are lining up for jobs at theme parks. Homelessness is no longer an affliction but a lifestyle. Captains of industry are booking tables for Denny's free breakfast. Food snobs are browsing the aisles at Costco. Fashionistas jam the changing rooms at Target. If they have any spare change. Their portfolios decimated, universities and art museums are selling treasures for cash. One problem: art buyers have no cash either. In France and the U.K. citizens are rioting against economic distress. The entire nation of Iceland is bankrupt and Icelanders are rioting too. It requires very severe economic distress to riot outdoors in the Icelandic winter. Can it be long before the good people of New York, Chicago, LA, and points in between take to the streets themselves?
Not for the first time, the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression hasn't brought out the best in the Republican party. As Russell Baker points out in the latest New York Review of Books, after the stock market crash of '29 Herbert Hoover waited three years for the magic of the free market to fix everything. By the time Roosevelt took office, dire economic conditions had become a world-wide economic cataclysm. As we all know this helped set the stage for the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazis, WWII, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, etc. It's really quite surprising how much damage a single brain-dead political party can do.
Now they're at it again, only worse. In the face of another economic collapse of historical proportions, the GOP's response goes beyond the catatonic, eschewing the sitting on of hands to promote a strategy articulated by Rush Limbaugh and executed by his followers in the House: make Obama fail.
Of course the Obama stimulus plan is far from perfect, though its worst imperfections were added to woo GOP support. But rational citizens understand that in the face of a multi-trillion dollar economic melt-down, a stimulus program in the hundreds of billions is merely a down payment. Reasonable citizens recognize that when the ship springs a big leak you bail first and worry about technique later. But not the Republicans. Their idea is to make the leak worse. They don't grasp that if the ship goes down, they go with it.
Forget Sarah Palin; the true Republican standard bearer is the woman the entire party rallied behind. And no wonder. The GOP saw Terry Schiavo and found themselves looking in the mirror.