By Martin Hackworth
The GOP has lost me. It’s taken over 35 years to make the journey from right of center moderate to left-of-center progressive but it’s finally happened. It wasn’t a smooth transition as much as a series of lurches about unsettling speed bumps: Ronald Regan, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and now the Tea Party. It’s not been about political ideology either — on that score I have a little more in common with conservatives than I do with liberals. It’s about how we ought to consider those among us who most need our help: the young, the old, the poor and the sick. I’m no longer willing to support anyone who reads Dickens and doesn’t see a reflection of themselves somewhere in a page.
I know Ronald Reagan is supposed to be a conservative icon — but I never saw it. What I saw was an actor with a superb ability to deliver a line but with a very ordinary ability to grapple with the world around him. Reagan made his nut as the last of the hard core cold warriors. If you’ve ever wandered into a bar where someone with a bottle of cactus juice was punching the same country song on the juke box over and over you’ll know that the Soviet Union was Ronald Reagan’s B-16. Because of this obsession with the crumbling Soviet empire America’s budget ballooned. Meanwhile the poor were increasingly portrayed as parasites sucking the marrow from everyone else. Perhaps Reagan spent so liberally on the military because he was planning on invading Watts after he was done with the Russkies.
In a country with the resources of the United States it is unconscionable that we value the welfare of children less than that of the largest special-interest group in the world — the American military industrial complex. Education, Head Start and other programs aimed at kids have suffered huge cuts. President George W. Bush twice vetoed bills to fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (despite its huge demonstrable benefits that cost less than many bits of military hardware that never get used) in favor of throwing money at Iraq and Afghanistan. As far as I can tell this largesse did little except make a few Iraqis, a few Afghanis and lots of American defense contractors very rich. I’m guessing that this just never come up in George W’s late night talks with Jesus.
Being young and impoverished is not a lifestyle choice. No 10-year-old kid would choose to grow up poor. I’m betting that none of the Republicans or their enablers in the conservative media who bash the poor have ever had the experience of having nothing to eat or having to go to school wearing the same beat up clothes for months. I’m betting that George W. Bush never had to go five years without seeing a doctor as a kid. And I’m betting that not a single member of the Tea Party caucus ever spent the night alone in a sleeping bag in the woods as a kid because they had no place else to go. I don’t have to bet, because I know for a fact that they all seem pretty sanctimonious sitting in the first pew in church every Sunday morning. Hypocrites — they make me want to break off a foot right in their bums.
Our financial straits are not nearly as dire as of those of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. We could correct our budgetary issues, spend rationally, have a fantastically affluent society and achieve social fairness with relatively little pain if we had the will and the wisdom to do so. The former certainly doesn’t seem to be an issue in the current debate over the budget. It’s the latter that’s in short supply. Since the last big issue among the far right before the budget ceiling was President Obama’s citizenship I think that we might be waiting for a while to get some smarts injected into public policy debates.
That the current debate over the budget is virtually fact-free (though matters of money are generally very well documented) and centers around solutions that disproportionally affect the most vulnerable of our society should surprise no one. The same crowd who are ready to tank the entire world’s economy over spending cuts — many of which don’t even make sense — also orbited in a fact-free zone when it came to climate change, the war in Iraq and our response to 9-11. These are people who seem oblivious to anything theoretical. And as long as they’ve got what they want their attitude seems to be to hell with everyone and everything else.
Well it’s a free country and you can think what you want. But I’ll never vote for a single one of you ever again.
Award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth, of Pocatello, is a senior lecturer in physics at Idaho State University and the publisher of motorcyclejazz.com.
Reposted with permission of the author
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