♦
aul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, in his column, took Eric Cantor to task today. The thing about Krugman which has always struck me as fascinating, is that Krugman has usually been right on the money with his political and economic forecasts. In fact, I'd go so far as to say Krugman averages better than your local TV weather guy. One very important point Krugman pointed out about Cantor is his hypocrisy, saying that Cantor once voted against a bill designed to cut funding for disaster relief and now he is the snake-in-the-woodpile of the GOP's latest attack on vulnerable Americans. Surely nobody has missed the brutal and uncivilized GOP tactic; the pattern which now comprises a large portion of their agenda: taking poor Americans hostage whenever they want their way. Shooting down Eric Cantor is a very sensible thing to do; but much as I love and admire Krugman, I think he misses the real point here. What has not been said loud enough of the GOP's current exercises in criminal thuggery is that the vileness which they show to the world is not even a hint of the evil which lies hidden by their deliberate muddying of the waters of American politics.
The good people of America, those who love truth, justice and the common good, as all or at least most of the intelligent do, will never bow to the vulgarity and the irresponsible heartlessness, indeed, the twisted mindset of the conservative right wingers. There are of course always the deviants and degenerates like the Koch brothers, the billionaire funders of the Tea Party, generous hosts to the wayward members of the Supreme Court, declared enemies of the Obama administration, not to mention proud sponsors of the much PBS programming. Unhappily the brothers are not alone. There are numerous behind the scenes, absurdly wealthy conservatives, and among them many religious fanatics who work unceasingly to disrupt this country's way of life to bring it to the Bible. They work to supplant the humanism of the US Constitution with their own version of American Theocracy.
May they all drop dead!
But enough backstory; on to the real evil. The hidden design is to disrupt and bring the Federal government into such an uproar of chaos and corruption, that the American people will eventually come to hate the government. When the American public comes to hate everything which speaks of a Central Government, the Anti-American forces of the GOP will have won their final victory.
Please note that I speak of the current crop of Republican and Tea party political leadership. The old guard Republicans, from the Eisenhower era are principled, compassionate lovers of truth and justice. They hate what their once proud party has become.
I really cannot say it better than the author of the essay "Goodbye To All That" in which he tells us that he was, for most of his life, a loyal conservative Republican. But now the grand old party of Lincoln, has become so over run with unsavory types like Bachman, Perry, Gingrich--- to name just a few, that he can no longer stay.
I quote:
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:
"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
Therefore, it is time to loudly call out the Anti-American forces among us. And that would be the corporate wealthy and their minions, the corrupt GOP of the decades since Reagan. ♦
