In in my previous diary I had committed a terrible sin of omission.
I had charged that the Republican Party is so completely bereft of constructive ideas and solutions that the Party has little to offer other than the scorched earth politics of divisiveness, hate and fear.
A reader, however, had responded with a mild complaint. It seems that I had been terribly unfair to the Republican Party for I had failed to include the Party's numerous and sterling accomplishments over the years. After careful thought I must admit that the reader is 100% correct. And so to be fair this post is dedicated to showing some of the GOP's accomplishments since President Ronald Reagan's era. There is no doubt that Republican policies and ideologies since President Reagan through George W. Bush have had a significant impact on just about every level of our society.
Below is the reader's list of twelve of the GOP's very finest governing ideologies.
- Subsidize the rich by taxing the poor.
- "Starve the beast" so they can drown the government in a bathtub. (Since this is, allegedly, a democracy, does that mean they want to kill America?)
- Sabotage every effort of a legitimately elected president and his party to fix the mess they created and count on the ignorance of the voting public to not realize who is responsible.
- count on the "liberal" media to keep the voting public ignorant.
- keep taking money from Fox "News." (Fox News recently donated $1,000,000 to the Republican Governor's Association so we can rightfully refer to Fox as the propaganda TV channel for the GOP.)
- blame the damn dirty brown people.
- blame Obama.
- blame Clinton.
- blame Carter.
- blame FDR.
- dress like an orange pekoe decorated Christmas tree and carry misspelled signs demanding paradoxical things.
- parade one political fossil after another on teevee, each illiterate in the subject of which they allegedly are an expert, to spout the talking point of the day.
These are merely twelve of the Republican Party's brilliant achievements. I have a few of my own to include as well.
Trickle down economics is a fraud. Reagan's former OMB Director, David Stockman, said as much himself. Trickle down is a trojan horse, he had said, for tax cuts for the very wealthy. Nothing trickles down to the middle and working classes. Trickle down trickles into the pockets of the very wealthy and racks up deficits. St. Ronald Reagan the Great and his crew had misled Congress and lied to the American people.
Republican candidates and politicians will sell their souls to the devil by taking money from a corporate propaganda machine that has a particular monetary agenda.
Or maybe FOX has pimped itself out to the GOP b/c it knows the Party candidates will carry its water. FOX already pays the salaries of prominent Republicans including some of the 2012 Presidential potential candidates Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
Whether FOX pursued the GOP or if it was the other way around does not matter. The bottom line is that neither FOX or the GOP has any intention of serving the interests and the needs of the majority of the American people. Both could care less where the voting public is concerned. Except during election cycles.
Moral cowardice. Contempt for the people.
Republicans work around the clock to block legislation that would throw an economic lifeline to the jobless, the uninsured, the chronically ill, the middle class and working poor.
In the summer when home for recess the Republican lawmakers, with the help of its tea party fringe and the Fox propagandists, of course, will organize town hall meetings in which everyone will go batshit crazy. Nothing of substance and importance will be discussed. Lawmakers won't talk about their plans to create news jobs because they have no plan. Nor will Republican lawmakers inform their constituents about how the health care reform act will help them gain access to affordable health care b/c the Party intends to repeal it.
Instead the town hall meetings will become yet another GOP/FOX manufactured circus. Republican politicians will rant and rave about big government, spending and state's rights. Of course the Republicans will forget to mention that all rubber stamped George Bush's whopping spending. Nor will they admit that deficits did not matter, according to Dick Cheney in 2006. But now they do.
What to do to make us forget about its W. era blind rubber stamping of spending programs and its unbridled contempt for social programs like Social Security and Medicare?
Distract us. Scare the daylights out of us. Fan the flames of hate by pushing emotional hot buttons.
Nor should we forget Sarah Palin's insane ravings about death panels.
When we think back about those long hot days in August, now it all seems like scenes from the Twilight Zone in which a troupe of crazy clowns, laced with a mind altering drug, had been unleashed upon the American public. After the circuses had folded their tents and left town, normalcy finally returned. One could hear the collective sighs of relief among the communities. Finally! The crazies had left.
Nor will many of us forget the spring of 2005 when the social conservative wing of the GOP interfered in the Terri Schiavo case in Florida. Then U.S. House Speaker Tom Delay and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist decided to rattle the nation's cage on social issues. Their rationale was to appeal to their base in order to make it politically tougher for Ben Nelson, a U.S. Senate Democrat who was up for re-election in 2006. Delay and Frist called then FL Governor Jeb Bush into service. He very willingly played along. And so the GOP along with Fox orchestrated a media circus while interfering with a husband's right to make a decision about his terminally ill wife. Neither the GOP or FOX could have cared less about the Schiavo family. GOP/FOX created a circus solely for political gain.
This very same scenario played out during the Clinton years in the late 1990's when the right wing drove the news cycles just as it is today. The media was in an absolute frenzy over Clinton's consensual affair to the extent that little else received attention. We were so consumed and distracted by the scandal that most of us missed the stories, if there were any, about a terrorist that lived in a cave in Afghanistan.
Today we are in the middle of yet another political fire storm about the construction of an Islamic cultural/recreational center, similar to that of a YMCA in NYC. This is a local issue among the residents of Manhattan and the mayor. There is no reason that any of us outside of New York should be involved.
And yet we are.
Because the GOP needs more distractions. It can't tell us how it intends to create new jobs or repair the busted economy because they have no plans. Nor will they explain why they are blocking the jobs bill that would enable $30 billion in funding to provide loans and provide tax relief for small business. I guess the GOP has as much contempt for small business as they do for the jobless, the struggling middle class and the impoverished.
But the Republicans are really ginning up the NYC mosque controversy because the Republicans see some political gain for themselves, too, just like they did during the HCR town hall meetings and the Terri Schiavo case. The Terri Schiavo case, however, was the beginning of the GOPs Waterloo.
So when the President recently reaffirmed the right of religious freedom in our country that includes American Muslims, the GOP smelled blood. The Party's demagogues Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck rushed on the scene spewing their usual rhetoric laced with hate, fear and plenty of shrill dog whistles.
Sarah Palin weighed in. New York City Mayor Bloomberg (R) took issue with Sarah's uninformed, insensitive and extremist views.
The week prior to the mosque issue Republicans had been screaming about repealing the 14th Amendment in order to strip U.S. born children of immigrants of their citizenship. To ratchet up the rhetoric U.S. House Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-extreme right) announced on the floor of Congress that there is a plot to raise "terror babies" in this country. When the babies grow up, according to a rather deranged Gohmert, the terror babies will destroy us. I know we've been having a heat wave here but heaven help us all. Louie must be suffering from long-term hate stroke.
Another reason the GOP fabricates the summer circuses is because they don't want us to know that they are incapable of governing. Since the Party hates big government to the core of its being, it simply cannot help itself from tearing it apart.
If the Republicans should ever take control of the White House and Congress again we would see the same re-run of the G.W. Bush Nightmare.
GOP operatives and strategists tell us that the Democrats cannot criticize the Bush Administration anymore because some of the rising star Republican candidates did not serve in the Bush Administration. But these new rising star candidates like Sharron Angle (FR-NV), Rand Paul (LR-KY) and Ben Quayle (FR-AZ) make President George W. Bush look like a centrist moderate.
I don't think we need any more Louie Gohmert types serving in our federal government, thank you.
"This is completely about scare tactics and politics."
Thank you Anderson.