The Platform of the Republican Party

In answer to the“Yes we can!” spirit of the Obama administration we present the don't do, can't do, won't do, try to make us, bet you can't no matter what you do, party. Nothing will work, our problems are unsolvable,your solutions whatever they are won't work and so we won't either.

This is the republican party gone W.I.L.D.E.R - Won't, Impede, Lie, Deny and Evade Responsibility. This is the new five fold motif of the modern republican party.  What kind of heroes are these, those that didn't bridge the gap and build the bridge? The ones who didn't bind the wounds or find the cures? Who didn't take the next step and forge ahead through difficulties because it was too hard? These are the backward looking leaders who didn't try harder when it was necessary to do the difficult things which achieve the great results. Find those folks in the history books, the ones that quit the race and opposed social security, rural electrification, civil rights, integration, medicare, medicaid, and every other necessary advancement our society has ever made.?

This is hardly the can-do spirit of American exceptionalism, achievement and comity at work. This is decidedly not the spirit that made America great. This is not the enterprise and entrepreneurialism that built a great nation but very much like the spiritlessness that always rips great nations apart and then tears them down. They are the eternal cowards and defeatists, in league with the forces of entropy and hate that will always profit more from disunion and demise than progress. Find something, one thing, in our history that was created by people with such a can't do track record and attitude of selfish narrow minded negation, nullification, prejudice and fear mongering indifference. Particularly when these are the very same people who created all the same problems that they now are busy keeping us from trying to fix.

To be great you must quietly work at achieving things – not not work at them at the top of your voice. The republicans unprincipled opposition to everything does not square with quality, it does not not pass the odor blotter or the stink -o-meter. For one thing do-nothingism too conveniently dovetails with the laziness and greed to which bad politicians on the take naturally incline. For another, the campaign bribery of the wealthy interests that consider democracy an impediment to their short term desire to collude and dominate and rob the society blind far outweigh the resources available to those seeking equitable,often complicated and always compromised solutions to achieve necessary long term change.  In other words, though it may impoverish us, it profits them to do nothing and then do less than nothing.

Wall Street and big business think (erroneously) that they can make more money from America by squeezing her dry now than in letting her breathe free and grow in equality and shared wealth and opportunity for all into the future. The republican party of today shares this delusion.

Goals, Tactics and Strategy

of the Republican Party

What sort of public policy does this group even believe in? It's hard to discern if you listen to them because they won't say it straight. But if you watch you'll learn. There are only two things they really care about. The only goals they doggedly pursue and make subservient to every other consideration year to year are tax cuts and deregulation that each happen to serve the wealthiest ten percent of the people. Everything else they may be for or against changes with the political winds. But these two things are their true gospel.

Every other proposal put forward by the republicans is only a tactical approach to achieve and maintain these two goals. Their platform is tactical, all camouflage and persiflage designed to disguise their true aims beneath their gut level politics of fear, hate and smear. For instance, they ostentatiously state they are in favor of religion without being noticeably spiritual themselves and patriotic without seeming to really care whether their policies are good for the country or not.

Since the majority of the republic does not profit from the two interconnected goals of republican policy – tax cuts for the wealthiest and deregulation for giant multinationals, it is therefore an essential element of their strategy to unite a following through division. The republican party today is more united through a collection of its shared prejudices rather than its positive beliefs. It's not what they are for but what they are against that primarily exercises their base.

Other than tax cuts for the least deserving and deregulation for the most predatory they really don't have anything they want to do in Washington anyway except enrich themselves so they try to undo everything that everyone else wants and finds of value. In this way they help the wealthy through a policy of governmental disarray or paralysis. And that is their policy. Nationally this serves as an almost a perfect contradiction in terms as they want to be elected to government as enemies of government in order not to govern in order to best serve the interests of the very few against the very many.

This loose configuration of shared prejudices and fears is the part of the population the republican party plays like a violin every election cycle to entice this group or that to the polls. An essential part of their strategy is Divide to Conquer. They incite half of the society against the other half in order to use them as leverage to claw and pry their way back into power. Since they really have no positive policy to point to that will stand scrutiny they pick at the natural divisions in our society like an impatient patient picks at barely healed over scabs or a vulture rips at road kill to locate the softest flesh within.

In essence then they hate gays, other religions, those who think differently, minorities and immigrants and intellectuals, even though many of their leaders and deep thinkers have the same educational backgrounds they now go out of their way to deride these as elitists. As they pretend to look back to those halcyon days of their youths when America was great they find, ironically, that the America they profess to admire was built precisely on bedrock laid with the social programs and policies and attitudes of the 1930's and 1960'swhich happen to be the very policies they now say they want to dismantle.

Vagaries of Change in a Two Party Democracy

This republican party is the Party of No, nullification and dissolution, the nattering nabobs of negativity and xenophobia. They are backward looking and selfish to an extreme; they are anti-immigrant, anti-minority, fear festering Luddites of the future. They hold the nation hostage not for any visionary purpose other than a mindless pursuit of their own political power which they have more than manifestly already proven that they do not deserve. When they had power they squandered it pursuing precisely the same deadendedness that they say, now that they are wiser, they would re-initiate if they ever got the chance again. After this long train of abuses how does one even consider rewarding a party like this for doing nothing now and for doing nothing but harm before?

This is not only destructive to the nation but to the republican party as well .Because by becoming the Party of No, for a small temporary advantage, which for simplicities sake requires no actual platform to publicly embrace as an alternative, the republicans risk huge permanent structural losses. The republican party has reduced from being a sum of its parts to a mere subtraction of its fractions. It is not based on a collation of truths but a temporary accumulation of fictions.There is no head to the tail of this dog, it wags however it will. Whoever gets the video of the day on youtube with a spurious plan or specious claim can set the new direction of the republican party for the week. So when Sarah Palin dishonestly invokes “death panels”as a way of opposing the Obama health care plan., Charles Grassley starts talking about “pulling the plug on grandma.” Or when someone proposes a repeal of the fourteenth amendment, once would-be serious Senators such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham climb on the band wagon and devolve into idiot speak about “anchor babies” and“drop and run” babies and even (according to an even dimmer wit)“terror” babies.

In this way the republican party is in a race with itself and the devil to the bottom in search of the lowest common denominator that they believe they can get away which intersects the point farthest to the right of the political spectrum. So we have the unmistakable wiff of cakes half baked, and theories not fully thought through and bridges to nowhere built to shores that never existed put forward as policy.

Like an ancient courtesan outlandishly clad, face painted garishly with cheap trinkets and bangles dangling from ears and arms, trying to allure her way through one last electoral trick, she'll chase like a filly after anyone who'll wave a few bucks in her direction. The republican party in its death throes is a nightmarishly grotesque caricature of its former legitimate self. It has Gingrich's nose, Limbaugh's girth, Beck's mouth and Palin's eyes (winking) and treats life like a charade, governing as a joke, and corruption as what they do for fun on the side as reward for their latest over the top performances.

The demise of something so large as one of the two major parties in the nation is a dangerous situation for all of us. In its last days it is capable of doing anything and harming anyone as it lashes out in all directions, thrashing and kicking with its giant extremities about in its final writhing death agony. It only remains to be seen how much damage it may yet do before it peacefully passes to the other side of history's great divide.

Yet if people are interpreting polls accurately they suggest the people are considering rewarding the republican party one more time for its obduracy and obstruction. This would be like giving a medallion to an orange traffic cone because you are upset with the inconvenience of a new bridge project under construction (If God would have wanted us to cross His rivers He would have given us either fins or wings). Obstructionism for its own sake is a negative act possible for a stump, a boulder or a dumb mule. Any coneheaded idiot can obstruct, prohibit and stop especially when there is no evident discernment necessary in the blind obstructionism. Put an orange cone in the road and it does its job without regard to whether the road project is a masterpiece or a boondoggle. Tell a republican to vote no and you get a similarly well considered rationale.

There must be a better way to express displeasure with the predictable frustration one has with the slowness and errors of hard won progress that any disaster rescue team in the heat and pressure of action faces than by giving power back to the creators of the disaster. Those who not only have no new answers but no apparent remorse or intention of rectifying their original mistakes are not to be trusted until they have proven they have reformed. But these republicans seem blindly determined, more than ever, of exactly recreating the grounds from which the first catastrophes sprung so that they might do it to us all over again.

Why else would the arrogant, unrepentant perpetrators of all our problems just stand around with their hands in their pockets refusing to help dig us out of the hole they dug us into - chewing their cud and spitting tobacco juice on the ground; complaining, grousing, posturing and pouting like spoiled brats, hoping we fail, betting against the country's ability to succeed while they deviously plot their resurgence - unless they truly, sincerely did not mean the nation well.

To be sure, on occasion to stand against something wrong when it is popular may be brave and worthy and noble. But when obstruction occurs for its own sake and perversely becomes an end in itself all to protect some ill-gotten gains or works out of mere fear of change; or when a pattern evolves to obstruct literally everything, without discernment or legitimate alternatives put forward; or when out of laziness or political calculation or mere cussedness, nope becomes just another four letter word, it is never admirable or worthy of respect or reward.

The walking, stalking, talking sit down strike the republicans are currently engaged in is much like their other tantrums that did nothing for the nation - the government shut down in 1995 for instance when they didn't get their way - is insupportable and unjustifiable. Strikes by government employees are illegal. In the past the courts have ordered them back to work. Or in Ronald Reagan's case with the air traffic controllers, they were summarily fired. That authority would be quite useful here. It is shocking to see grown women and men behave in such a churlish, childish, thumb-sucking manner as this. It is difficult for such behavior to command respect let alone earn a vote.

      To reward such people is clearly a perversion of our democracy, especially when the flip side means you will be punishing politicians who actually did do something ( which the last election clearly urged them to do), made the hard choices,worked the late hours, weighed the painful compromises, ignored the difficult consequences and took the tough votes.

But how does one evince displeasure and discontent with the democratic party without simply voting them out and putting the republican party in? The traditional ways. Get more involved not less. But the one thing you don't do is throw your vote away on someone who doesn't even carry a germ of respect for the offices they are seeking. A vote is a sacred thing. It is hard to justify wasting it on someone who will take it only to abase it with juvenile rhetoric, bizarre ideas, lockstep ideologies and devotion to causes not worthy of a major American political party.

The Prime Sources of the Nation's Unrest

These are twofold. One is actual and external and the other is perceptual and internal.

The chief External argument against the democrats in Congress seems to be first - the Wall Street bail out package and second - the stimulus package to re-energize the economy. First, as a point of honor, the Wall Street bail out was engineered and passed when George Bush was still in office. But other than that it is precisely the same problem these two remedies are trying to attack just from opposite directions.

As an example, it is as if someone carelessly drove their car too near the outward side of a mountain road. The car spun off the blacktop and skidded into the sand on the shoulder of the road from where, the sand being too soft to gain traction for the car to be backed out, it was in clear danger of continuing to slip farther down the unstable side of the shifting, sandy hillside into the deep canyon below.

The bailout then could be likened to an attempt to shore up the car from above, to stop the slide, to ensure the erosion is slowed, to regain some stability in our economy and to keep the car from sliding further down the sandy cliffside. In this the bailout succeeded.

The stimulus package on the contrary was to get the car started so it could then be driven up the declivity and back onto the road again. These two things were each entirely necessary and it is hard to see how it could have been managed differently, better perhaps, but not differently. So the popular arguments against these two things are in error. And they are especially dangerous and disingenuous now for policy members to make because the car is still teetering perilously on the side of the cliff. Moreover, it is all too apparent that the economic recovery from the Great Republican Gilded Recession has been progressing too slowly.

That puts these two arguments in contradiction. An acknowledgment of the economy's sorry state today highlights the source of its original infection which was a result of the economic crisis brought on by the collapse of the subprime market and the entirely unregulated derivative market at the tail end of the Bush administration. Apparently, to elaborate on the image, the big banks borrowed our economy and went on a long, snoring drunken joy ride with a car load of floozies.

The bailout and stimulation package together were designed to mitigate the worst of the damage caused by these unscrupulous bankers and their vacuous political enablers. That the economy is still weak argues not that nothing should have been done but that more needed to have been done because clearly if nothing had been done as the republicans now seem to claim, the economy would be far worse, and our car would have long since fallen over the cliff, floozies, mortgages, bankers and all.

I'm first in line to say that it could have been done better. The TARP bailout was far too gentle on the bankers and banks whose greed, stupidity and recklessness had caused all the problems. The voters quite properly took it into their hands in the last election to throw out many of those of the republican party who had looked the other way while the bankers had their fun with our money. Yet now many of these same politicians who loaned our car with no strings attached to these nitwit money managers in the first place have changed their tune and are singing the same chorus they were singing before the collapse. Moreover the stimulus was no more potent than it was because the republicans had raided the treasury blind and there was little money left for stimulation in light of the huge deficit they had given us.

But again since the economy is still weak you can argue that the bailout and stimulus should have been done better but not that these things shouldn't have been done at all. However this is exactly their argument. They say neither should have been done, as if the car should have been left to its own devices to drive itself back to the highway driverless. And in this case, again, not only were the obstructionist republicans as much or more to blame than anyone for the inception of these problems but their obstructionism now is only succeeding in making the situation they initially made bad, that much more ominous.

At least they are consistent, they were wrong then, they are wrong now and from their rhetoric show every intention of being wrong in the future.

To justify their current unjustifiable behavior the republicans have tried everything they can think of to change the topic and portray the democrats as either radical or illegitimate (to say that Hawaii is not really a state, for instance) - neither of which is even remotely accurate. All of this to justify their own legislative truancy, their arrogance, their own inflated sense of entitlement and their own guilty pasts. In this respect, they protest too much.

Several months ago when the republicans were being called the Party of No by the democrats, Mitch McConnell hit on what must have seemed ( to him) a brilliantly clever formulation. “We are the party of Know,” he said. Get it? If lead balloons could fly it still would have gone higher than this trial.

Because ignorance is no more bliss than it is a virtue. And yet for the first time in our history we have an American political party that has wrapped itself around willful ignorance as a core belief, like a tuxedo fitted on a chimpanzee. How else to explain such a self-serving wave of denial and persistent mischaracterizations of known facts. How else can you explain the intentional mangling of the meaning of words, changing their definitions as it suits their purposes, or their continuous assault on truth and logic, the denials of obvious truths and their continual attempts at smear tactics and libelous character assassination of all who may disagree with them? These tactics don't argue honesty in those who engage in them but illegitimacy.

Even now perhaps in league with those great patriots on Wall Street (as if there has ever been such a thing as a patriot on Wall Street) they are even trying to slow the economic recovery from their own recession, dooming millions to joblessness and millions more to reduced future earnings all for the sake of short term political posturing. The hidebound quack doctor would rather see the patient die than see another doctor's remedy succeed.

As for the Internal problems of the Democratic Party it seems to be a bit like a line from “Cool Hand Barack”. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Even when they do something well or even historic, that is according to polls quite popular and timely, somehow the democrats lose the atmospherics and arguments associated with the endeavor. This takes rare political skill. Are the democrats as feckless and timid and weak as they seem? According to the polls apparently so. This is not pleasant to behold. The democrats seem afraid to stand behind their own accomplishments. This inevitably spawns doubt in the peoples' minds which is as easy to exploit as it is hard to eradicate. This is not good leadership. The people grow restless with leaders who inspire so little confidence in them because they have so little confidence in themselves.

The democrats seem to be easily bullied by the right wing and the republican party. This may not quite be fair but it is a legitimate concern because it fosters an image of weakness and lack of courage. People like strength and lack of confidence highlights many minor ills in the society that wouldn't be there if the democrats were more forcefully in their position, more thoroughly in charge, better liked and trusted. This is their own fault. It doesn't justify the actions of the republicans, to be sure, but unless the democrats can connect better with the American people and inspire some confidence in them soon it may cost them seats in Congress.

However, I am here to argue, that that is not really the problem. The democrats are hardly perfect but they are also hardly so cynical, hypocritical and imperious as the republicans were when they were in charge. It is actually far, far better for the nation to return to the days when people legislated modestly, without wild exaggeration and inflated pontification. Self-effacement is actually far preferable to bombast and self-inflation, yet it will apparently take a far more astute and intelligent electorate than we currently seem to possess in these days of cable network news to see it, much less reward it.

Take health care reform as an example, even if it is not something you can yet be certain you like, the alternative we had was clearly not working efficiently. Change was necessary. Why not give the alternative a chance to work? And yet the republicans now want to undo it prior to even seeing if it will work and waste the herculean effort it took just to get it passed ( with a super majority in the Senate made necessary by none other than the republicans own cynical filiblustery)? And so they want to rescind it to give us what, the same expensive, uncertain,exception riddled, non universal mess we had before?

But in fact, save one or two things, the republicans have voted against everything, and delayed even the things they eventually voted for, merely as thoroughly vindictive vandals of the legislative process. It's hard to argue as they do that there has been a legitimate basis for their arguments against policies enacted by the democrats. People who have legitimate alternative arguments make them, they are member of a legislative body after all and it is exactly what they are accepting our money to do. People who don't have legitimate arguments to make scream epithets and throw stones at your home and scatter nails in your driveway. It is when behavior veers toward the psychotic that you begin to understand that there is some deeper issue at work here than just a simple disagreement over policy.

People sometimes seem more confused with large enterprises than they would ever be about small ordinary day to day tasks. So if you were going to hire someone to mow and rake and manicure your lawn, who would you hire? Someone who, though dull, went about their job diligently, got a great deal of work done and was even perfectionistic and honest enough to allow that in certain areas someone else might have done it much better. Or would you hire the bombastic twit who didn't do anything but whine and cavil and complain about everything, generally do nothing while espousing bizarre and unsubstantiated theories about fertilizer and the cycles of the moon and the growth of cabbage and a thousand other absurd and unrelated things? And who, when they were finally forced to work mangled your hedges to death and broke your lawnmower by running it into a boulder and then tried to blame everything on someone else? Obviously no one would willingly hire the second character for even the most menial task, why would anyone vote for a person like this now for congress. Because the job is too important to give to someone competent?

Another black mark against the republicans should be the strange fact of the breathtaking unanimity of their voting. This also tends to disprove the alleged integrity of their actions. People who have consciences and vote them tend to show and adhere to a whole range of reasonable positions and a healthy migration across party lines will generally ensue. This is what we expect when we send folks to congress, some degree of discernment, judgment and individuality unique to our needs and their own legislative personality. Otherwise why not just send people who merely take large amounts of money from lobbyists and do as they are told and tell whatever untruth they feel is necessary to explain their actions to the public? Politicians with no consciences or knowledge or ethics do exactly this, they do as they are told and vote like pack animals.  A politician who takes money to approximate an ersatz set of principles simply proves they have none of their own.

No the Party of No has voted over the last year and a half, or chosen not to vote, not out of conscience or caution or love of country, but mere obstreperousness and shallow political calculation. Tellingly, they have derided many policies before they even knew what they were (even those that are unmitigated advancements and long overdue) before, during and after the debates which brought them into being. They denounced these policies in the harshest terms even before they could know the final shape they might take. They made up reasons to vote against issues they have always supported before and eventually voted for again. It is, as I said earlier, as if they protest too much. Are they against health care reform because they think it won't work or because they are afraid it will? Their behavior speaks more to the latter than the former.

If this is true, then the republicans have clearly abdicated their sworn duty to the nation, broken their oaths of office and forsworn what we are paying them to do. By not offering well intentioned alternatives or even trying to participate in a bipartisan way to solve the most pressing problems facing the nation, even if just to set a marker in the sand for a better way ahead, they are behaving more as America's enemies than her friends. Republicans have often famously and often infamously railed against those poor Americans on welfare and have even refused to extend aid to those out of work, claiming they do nothing but sit around all day waiting for their government checks to arrive in the mail. How are these republicans in congress today any better? In fact they are worse because they have jobs they refuse to do, leaving the work undone and the public doubly impoverished for their investment.

And yet now the republicans want more people in Congress who think just as they do? And they now not only loudly preach of a fiscal responsibility they never possessed when they were in charge, they like to talk reverentially of a freedom which they do not even seem to grasp the meaning of.

For has there ever been such a bovine congeries of gutless sheep in the history of the United States Congress as these guys? They consistently vote as a bloc according to what they are told no matter how absurd the purpose, patent the power play or self-evident the harm to the country they swear they love? To display such unwavering discipline no matter what any individual member may personally believe, in abeyance of national need or quality of the legislation before them, is unprecedented. It is inhumanly shallow. No matter how harebrained the destination each republican regardless of their oath of office or responsibility to the people climbs on board the latest train to nowhere without a quibble or thought. And as they mindlessly step on board they have the audacity to each repeat the same prearranged, prepackaged, memorized line they have been given for the occasion – whether death panels, socialism, torture works, soak the rich, big government is evil, tax and spend democrats, supply side economics, activist judiciary, yadda, yadda, yadda. And the most ludicrous mantra of all – “political correctness” - is still used by the party that will not accept any variance of its members from its ever rightward shifting creed. It's like a robot's convention short circuited by a lightening strike in 1984. It is downright un-American to be this easily intellectually enslaved. This is not freedom, nor is this what they were hired to do. Have they no minds or souls or personal opinions left? No one is afforded the right to be so unconscientious in their duties as to be so thoroughly wrong about nearly everything over such a long period of time, especially when it is their own constituencies that pay not only their unearned salaries but a much, much steeper hidden price for their unrelieved incompetence, childish propaganda and ultra-destructive do-nothingism.

Shakespeare's Take

“Thus I clothe my naked villany

with odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ

And seem a saint when most I play the devil.” - Duke of Glouster

(later Richard III)   from Richard III

For fun and elucidation try rereading the second and third parts of Henry VI and Richard III by Shakespeare to see what happens when you have so many thugs and crooks arrayed around a single source of power like wild, growling, snarling dogs in a circle around a bone. First, in Henry VI there was a too compliant king and weak party backing him. The one person who did have his and the country's best interests at heart (Humphrey) watched as his ambitious wife was tricked by his enemies into an indiscretion and exiled. Next he was systematically slandered and betrayed and finally murdered to be put out of their way. There was even an unintellectual people's revolt, Jack Cade's, secretly fomented by the Duke of York for his own purposes which Shakespeare wittily portrayed as being intolerant even of someone being so little intelligent as to be able to write their own name.

Replace a treaty which to the people's mind gave away two provinces in France with TARP and the stimulus package put forward by the Bush and Obama administrations, and Jack Cade could be taken as surrogate for the Tea Party. Otherwise assign roles as you will – Palin for Queen Margaret, Romny for York, Gingrich for Suffolk, the politicized leaders of the religious right for the Bishop(later Cardinal) of Winchester, McCain for Warwick, etc. Some of the lesser thugs and cheats would serve for McConnell, Boehner, Beck-Baugh, etal and finally, let's say, Rupert Murdock as Richard III, and verily the past eerily repeats itself today.

Of course as Shakespeare compressed and recast certain historical events it was only endless destruction which ensued from this cast of reprobates. One by one each was unclothed, exposed and deposed (which in those day meant killed) as they tried to outlast the others for what was left after their machinations of destruction had done their worst. Because that is what we have yet to fully see with the republicans here – because when these moral clowns and nerds finally start to cut each other down to midgetry the real blood letting will begin. Duplicity and rampant opportunism as your primary political sword has a short historical shelf life. It will score gains impressively at the outset but must soon start to implode like a dirigible with an expanding pin hole, slowly at first and then with a bang. Because once a race to the bottom starts it is exceedingly difficult to to stop.

And there is no doubt the republicans are growing worse and that the bottom is where they are headed. They have always worn their hypocrisies lightly but now they wallow in them like swine in a mudhole after a spring rain.

The Futility and Danger of Repeating Yesterday Today

Let's not forget how we got here. All these problems we are faced with today are pretty much entirely the fault of the permanently unrepentant republicans to begin with. Sorry to say, but they have been more in charge of the direction of the country and its government than anyone else for nearly the last thirty years. That's why it is at least a little ironic to hear them talk of all the wrongs and evils and faults of our government since they were running it when all the faults, wrongs and evils they now criticize occurred, as if someone else was to blame for their own excesses and bad behavior other than their own selves.

And after all, what do you call someone who doesn't let anyone else fix what they have broken? The Party of No is the kindest epithet. They represent the exact antithesis of the can-do spirit of America which is what made us great. Their antics are the betrayal of our future, of democracy itself, because when one party refuses to acknowledge the legitimate majority rule of the other and as loyal opposition join together with them for the good of the nation they disrespect the constitution and despise the democracy.

Let's look back shall we, a quick trip down memory lane. I guarantee it will seem like just yesterday.

Not so Golden Moldy Oldies:

the Republican Party's greatest hits - 1980-2010

• Supply side pyramid scheme – This has been the republican party's magic bullet, its ultimate economic alchemy ( “voodoo economics” – George Bush I), the magic money machine, that states that the lower the tax rate the greater the tax revenues that will be gathered. This is a transparent fraud to enrich themselves and their patrons today as they thieve and plunder the future of the country's tomorrow. Supply Side economics as propounded by the republicans is simply a Ponzi scheme which floods money upwards like a pyramid, or an upside down funnel, enriching those upstream and impoverishing all below the very highest economic plateau. This scheme, this Madoff economics, is ongoing even today and has not been disavowed but frequently reiterated among the leadership of the republican party.

• “Deficits don't matter,” (Dick Cheney) - The republicans' massively discredited “supply side” economic theory has so far cost the American people years of growth, many trillions of dollars and impoverished millions of Americans in the process of buying us absolutely no investment in our future. From 1980-2008 this scheme (which, remember, allegedly creates more tax revenues than it cuts) has authored a tenfold increase in the national debt from $900 billion to $10 trillion. This debt was not necessary, it did not strengthen the long term interests of the nation, nor fix any of our exigent problems as they have arisen which has enabled them to continued to grow out of control unaddressed. This debt was not noble, it is not debt gathered by any shared national sacrifice for the mutual good and well being of ourselves and our children. For as the wealthiest have profited exponentially, the rest of us have suffered nearly static wages, diminishing opportunities, lowered quality of life and anemic national economic growth. Our competitive edge has been lost as America has lost ground against the rest of the world. Supply side debt has brought us nothing which could endure and was not an outgrowth but a mockery of long term economic planning. Republican economic policy has always been only about short term theft. The ones who control the republican party saw a large pool of money devoted toward public services and coveted it.  They have done everything they can do to get their hands on it and make it theirs by turning government into their own private enclave.  Nor was this debt a product of tax and spend democrats, it was not spent for social welfare issues, not spent on the poor or infrastructure projects or job growth but only for tax “relief”for the wealthiest ten percent of the people who already had the lightest tax burden of anyone in the country. And every last dime of this massive outpouring of red ink was created by the republicans. The only responsible administration in the last thirty years was democratic (Bill Clinton's) which actually abandoned supply side, this offensively corrupt gush up - trickle down economic theory, and balanced the budget. But as soon as George Bush won the White House in 2000, he blew the dam apart again. And yet now the republicans hysterically complain about democratic deficit spending. You'd need a chain saw to cut the hypocrisy

• Drill (the public) Baby Drill (the “expletive deleted” public) – Republicans as a matter of policy believe that all regulations which don't serve their purposes should either be abrogated or ignored when they are in office and corporations and lobbyists should at all times be in bed with the regulators tasked with overseeing them on our behalf. A good place to start would be “a moratorium on new regulations”, John Boehner (who hopes to be the Speaker of the House), opined recently. This even though two of the most egregious and costly examples of the evils of this non-regulation policy have reared their ugly heads - BP's monumental oil spill in the Gulf and the financial community's near implosion of the world's economy.

  Surely these cautionary examples of astonishing regulatory failure must still be fresh somewhere in Boehner's mind. Yet republicans just don't care, they still claim that regulating oil and mining operations that exploit the natural resources and people of the United States should not be the business of the people of the United States. In their minds, multinational corporations should be able to plunder our natural resources on the cheap and then sell them back to us at top dollar and we should have no say in or be able to oversee any aspect of the process which is victimizing us. We must simply stand aside like good little slaves and watch idly as our own natural resources dwindle before our eyes with no general profit or benefit to the nation.

• Weapons of Mass Destruction – Casual war as a campaign tactic; truth, American soldiers' and innocent civilians as war casualties; two-faced casuistry as ongoing justification for the unjustifiable and terrorism as a tool for fear mongering and keeping public opinion distracted and in line.

• Torture and the Imperial Government – Abu Gehraib, et al. The republicans invented a bizarre and an entirely unconstitutional “unitary executive” theory to justify disregard for the public's right to know, to allow them to ignore all cries for public disclosure, to let them torture and do illegal wiretaps and to ignore any and all lawful Congressional investigation and oversight into their malfeasance. The administration was always abetted in this domestic imperialism by servile republicans in congress. They also engaged in phony science and coverups of publicly funded and legislatively mandated studies and oversight designed to give Congress and the public the best information possible to inform their decisions whenever these true findings disagreed with their own false political prejudices.

• Campaign Finance Reform Opposition - The republicans are staunch in their belief that increasing corruption and ensuing stalemate in Congress is a good thing. They believe that outside forces which reward them for not operating on behalf of the public interest or doing their jobs properly or at all (as long as they get their cut of the proceeds) far outweighs their solemn promise to the voters to work exclusively for them. Many republicans support the Conservative Court's ongoing efforts to destroy campaign finance reform and were quick to praise the Supreme Court's narrow decision in the Citizen's United case which supports a corporation's ability to engage in unlimited financial participation in all of our political processes. Among many, many other onerous side effects this will lead to the increasing gentrification of congress as the increasing influx of money into the process invites racketeers and multimillionaires and people going into politics only for personal enrichment.  Then these insensitive and unqualified people will then exercise a determinative amount of influence over our legislative process and, by obvious implication, bend and shape the future health and direction of the country even more in the direction of the very well to do. All this so congress, just like the night manager of a cheap motel, can enshrine the revolving bed of the open door relationship between industry and government to a corrosive level in our democracy with the Court's lusty approval.

• Disastrous Financial Deregulation – Shamefully weak laws and total lack of oversight has led to the Great Republican Gilded Recession under which we are currently laboring (especially if you no longer have a job to labor at) where multimillionaire CEO's regularly give themselves multimillion dollar pay raises and bonuses as billionaire shareholders make more and more from their corporations' record profits. Many of these are the same ingrate banks and financial institutions which the taxpayer drew back from brink of bankruptcy, which now thrive while workers' wages and benefits are slashed across the board, the middle class and poor are decimated and no benefit is ever too small to be kept from trickling down to the most needy. Yet even with this few Republicans could be found to support any sort of meaningful financial regulations and reform. And yet the tea party republicans profess to blame the Obama Administration for the bank bailout at the end of the Bush administration.

• Eternal Ruinous Tax Cuts for millionaires and billionaires – The republican party wrote the manual on how to wreck the future of the country to enrich themselves today. They have systematically robbed the nation of its necessary, fairly collected revenues, systemically embedded debt into all operations of our undermanned government and continue to widen the gap between the very rich and everyone else. If proof were needed that they still have no intention of behaving with even a modicum of responsibility for love of country's sake they have pretended that the expiry of the disastrous Bush administration tax cuts is really a tax increase and want to extend them regardless of the consequent explosion of deficit spending that would inevitably ensue. On the contrary, it must be understood that any one sided tax decrease for the very well to do is necessarily a tax increase on the rest of us.
  

• Global Warming Denial - As a key part of their pernicious and constant war on the environment and everyone and everything in it, while the icecaps melt, republicans suggest we should apologize to the polluters for daring to try to survive in areas they are busy polluting while rifling our natural resources to a point beyond livability.

• Assaults on Separation of Church and State – Also to meet short term political ends, they have fostered and sponsored shameless and casual attacks on one of the fundamental pillars of the brilliant success and equity of our society. To put the kindest face on it, these attacks grew out of a pretended and very loudly expressed sense of moral superiority and spiritual insight evident to no one but themselves. This has allowed them to hack away at our religious freedoms and try to sever the mystic bonds that have held the nation together since its inception and to emotionally divide the nation against itself, brother against brother, parents against children, and neighbor against neighbor, merely in order to further their cruel regime of class warfare, social preferment policies and ruinously destructive economics.

• The Tea Party - An idea I believe was purloined from me represents a well funded fake tantrum of known untruths, radically erroneous exaggerations and smear and fear tactics disguised as populism. By this means wild extremism is being channeled mainline and shot into the veins of the republican party.

• Opposition to comprehensive immigration reform – When a republican president (Bush II) and future republican nominee for president (McCain) bravely joined forces in a good faith effort to address the immigration problem along our southern borders, many democrats stood ready to help. Republicans refused. Instead they erected nonsensically simplistic solutions to this complex set of interconnected problems solely in order to posture before an upcoming election while scuttling all serious debate of the topic which only can grow worse the longer an adult solution to a difficult problem is delayed. Amazingly, now many of these same politicians can be seen supporting an entirely unconstitutional, highly prejudicial and dangerously unworkable scheme in Arizona to “solve” the problem illegally which they didn't have the fortitude to solve legally when they had the opportunity. Instead they employ the sophistry that “government”wouldn't address this problem even though they were in charge of the government at the time and could have easily done so if they had had the heart and brains to try. Through this one maneuver you can see straight to the soul of one of their most elemental scams.  Although they have usually been in the majority, ruling part of government over these last thirty years, it is the results of their own loaded activities they intemperately rail against, which allows them to continue their basic duplicity of positively gorging on their cake and then eating ours too. They have done their best to pollute the well of public service and then dare us to drink from it even while damning up the free flowing springs of fresh water available only to them so that no one but them can use them.
  

• Polarizing fights and Phony Issues – To solve the non-existent scourge of flag burnings, although they could point to no current instance where this had occurred, for instance, they proposed changing the constitution. Or they ballyhooed a judge posting the ten commandments in his courtroom even though it was not so much his courtroom as the peoples' courtroom. Or the patently unconstitutional line item veto which they supported for years until it passed and was immediately declared unconstitutional.  Or gay marriage which they oppose every election cycle, or, on and on and on. Like, for instance, when they shamelessly and vulturously interfered in a human family tragedy in the Terry Schiavo case merely to score political points at the expense of the very people they claimed to care so deeply for. Or, lately, solely to generate ethnic and religious hate and controversy, they are belligerently opposing a Muslim prayer center in the general vicinity of where the terror attacks of 9/11 occurred even though it is a local civic issue in which they should have no involvement.

• Division as a Political Tool – Divisiveness is their only constant and contention their stock in trade. The republicans create fissures in society solely in order to divide us against ourselves for their political advantage.  They feast at poking at the tenderest, sorest spots in our society, delight in picking at scabs of barely healed wounds, and driving wedges between Americans regardless of the disruptive consequences and potential violence and hate which might ensue from their actions. To this end, they actually claim there are good and bad Americans, good families and bad families, good states and bad ones, good freedoms and bad, bad religions and good. What kind of worthless leadership would ever choose to divide a country it hoped to lead? What kind of anti-American would prefer the nation disunited and at each others throats? Certainly no real American ever would desire such a thing. With these spurious politics the republicans aim low and generally achieve their goal with head room to spare. So far they have found no swampland too base and fetid for them to avoid. They'll play every low, divisive card in the deck, whether, race, immigration, religion, class, anti-intellectualism and anti-science, to keep the people ignorant and suppressed, xenophobic and afraid of the future. They have even used such dark national fears such as terror attacks primarily for their own political and imperial ends and personal aggrandizement. They have given us a government of increased racial tensions, government shut downs, manufactured impeachments, endless investigations (whenever they have been in charge)of the other party, eternal filibusters, social unrest, prolonged recession and any other convoluted means they can contrive, whatever the cost to the nation – to get their way.

• Lies and Misinformation as a Political Gambit - Sometimes, when all else fails, they just knowingly lie, like death panels in the health care debate or yellow cake from Niger in the debate as to whether it was necessary to attack Iraq (again), or whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States and may be Muslim. Or whether he's a socialist or fascist, etc, on and on. Even though according to their oath of office, lying to the public, their employers who they are sworn to serve and who pay their salaries, is never acceptable.

• Yellow Tabloid Journalism (Rupert Murdock) – Unlike most grateful immigrants Murdock is not grateful to our democracy for his opportunity and displays no allegiance to our institutions or love for our people. His vandal like attitude is more about plundering our system for his advantage alone. His organs, Fox (Faux) News and the Wall street Journal allied with the Beck-Baugh type leeches on the body politic and a disturbingly complaint republican party at their beck and call and their win at all cost, destructive attitude toward the public as enemies of our social unity are the true anti-American force in our midst.

• They are Growing Worse – The new even more extreme crop of republican candidates have registered attacks on the legitimacy of Social Security, Minimum wages, the 14^th and 17th amendments to the constitution, the education and energy departments, the new health care reform, Medicare and Medicaid, civil rights, the United Nations and (why not?) electricity (as an earlier corps of republicans opposed the League of Nations they also opposed rural electrification), the wheel (for roundness lacks clear divisions and sides to attack) and all variances in human nature which they happen to disapprove of.

• The Party of No - Consult the beginning.
  

Even the Pledge of Allegiance, said every day by schoolchildren across the country, has been used as a wedge issue by republicans to question the religion and patriotism of others. But their belief in it apparently goes only so far. They profess to believe in the words“under God” but as to the preceding concept of the “one nation” under Him they express some doubt, as well as to the word just following the word “God” which is “indivisible”. This concept of indivisibility is apparently entirely contingent on their getting their way on everything or else, as some already have done, they are quick to threaten succession from the union. Apparently their patriotism runs as shallow as their reasoning and ethics often do.

Perhaps one could say that even these dirtiest, sleaze level politicians ( as members of arguably the least well intentioned and patriotic organized party in our history) wouldn't be quite so bad if they were attempting to achieve something, anything, exalted or noble, but they aren't. They are merely the shallow vanguard for all the usual historical suspects lurking behind them secretly in the shadows engaging in all their insidious, nefarious activities, their greed and their graft and slavish devotion to big money interests at the expense of every principle that every person in the country except themselves holds dearer than life itself.

 

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