2 July 2011 Damn the economy, sink Obama
Luckovitch rightfully depicts the GOP and their teavangelist minions as vandals, destroying for the sake of destruction. While these elected officials were sent to D.C, as representatives of their constituents, to serve the nation’s best interests, they have forgotten any loyalties they once had except that toward party. Party, in this case, is akin to the religion charged tribalism that we object to when dealing with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and the Middle Eastern Arab states.
We were forewarned that this impasse could happen. Mitch McConnell called for it when he proclaimed that the GOP’s primary goal after 2008 was to prevent Obama’s re-election. That has a very high predictive value for government immobilization. The current teavangelists regard the Gingrich-driven shutdown during the Clinton administration as something to be emulated. Their idea of” killing government “indicates that they have very little knowledge of how government actually meshes into the daily lives of all our citizens.
To allow the GOP/teavangelists to roll government back to the pre-Wilson levels is to throw away all our public safety successes, to destroy our social safety nets, to end education for most people at the 8th grade level, and to see our infrastructure decay to dirt roads.
The history of this nation reveals many bitter and needless partisan fights among Congress, the executive branch, and even the high court. But nowhere in that history is there an attempt to bankrupt the government for political gain by any political party. Never before has the hatred for a sitting President been so great that the opposition was willing to destroy the national economy, and perhaps the global economy.
That’s the point we’ve reached. The GOP is so angry at Obama’s election that they are behaving like vandals, destroying our government because they can. Their teavangelist lackeys are all too happy to see this happen because of the innate racism, and distrust of anyone who reads for pleasure, passed high school English and Geography, and who expects competent, honest political candidates rather than the Palin-Bachman practice of fact fabrication.
I never imagined that anyone elected to Congress would attempt to destroy this nation because his or her party lost an election. But it is happening today. To imagine that it is acceptable to force our government to default on its payments is, well, unimaginable. The thought shows so much contempt for the American citizens that it should be reason for recall of anyone who acts to allow or cause such default.
The continual wail from the right that the nation is heading into third world status needs to be addressed. There’s a lot of truth to that belief. Unfortunately, the people wailing loudest are the people pushing us down that path. The GOP/teavangelists are digging in to torpedo what is left of our economy. Their corporate backers will care for them so that the congressional minions will never miss a meal. But millions of Americans are going to miss a lot of meals. Our unemployment numbers today will seem miniscule if the GOP carries out its Attack on America.
This is the two-minute warning for all those people who believe the GOP lie apparatus. The far right doesn’t need your votes any longer. It lured you into its base with religious, social, and cultural hot-button matters while it sent all it money and all your jobs offshore. Now they have their offshore havens that they can use to ride out the economic depression they are going to initiate. They’ll get rid of those safety and health regulations, those banking and financial laws and regulations, and that minimum wage thing they hate so much. They’ll bust the unions and re-open the sweatshops so that the kids have something to do after the schools are shut down.
No matter what Obama would like to believe; no matter what you and I might hope to believe, the GOP/teavangelists are going to wreck the economy because they believe that the American voters are inherently stupid enough to allow them to pin the subsequent economic disaster on Obama, and to unseat him, allowing the GOP to elect another idiot driven by fanatical Christianity and voodoo (trickle down) economics theory.
Paul Krugman voiced the same concern in his column in the New York Times this week. He wrote:
“So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.
Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.
So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”
And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.”
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