On the Contrary

Watching the Republican Party gyrations this week and their attacks on anything Obama, I have come to the recognition that all that is left in the Republican Party are lunatics escaped from the asylum and still refusing to face reality.  But let us not ignore our misanthropic media which fails at every turn to note the hypocrisy or lunacy of these attacks and report it with a straight face as though these are valid charges.  But I digress.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) said that she wants residents of her state “armed and dangerous” over President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce global warming “because we need to fight back.”  But it gets worse. She said that “Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.”  So she doesn’t like the outcome of the election and therefore will not abide by it.  I wonder what part of democracy she doesn’t get?  Oh I forgot, all of it.  Remember, she is the one who thinks liberals are un-American and should be investigated.
• Then there is the whole pack of them that are complaining that if the Democrats use the reconciliation process to pass their budgets bypassing the filibuster, it is a wholesale mugging of the government process.  My how memories are short.  Let’s see, there was the Bush Tax Cuts, or as Senator Sanders, an independent from Vermont asked, why reconciliation was such a good idea when it came to giving tax cuts to millionaires but such a bad one when it comes to trying to provide health care to average Americans.  Then it was used to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.  All this by the Republicans who thought majority rule was good enough for these issues.  Hypocrisy has no bounds.
• Then there are the claims by House Minority Leader John Boehner’s (R-OH) that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s proposal for new powers to regulate and if necessary take over financial institutions other than banks constitutes “an unprecedented grab of power”.  Oh really?  Should we continue down the unregulated path we have been on.  Should we leave these institutions in the hands of those morons who got us where we are?  Part of the problem is that financial institutions like investment firms and insurance agencies no longer act in traditional ways.  So we should follow the lead of the Republicans whose laissez-faire policies got us to where we are?
• Then there is the claim that the Obama’ budget is a giant step toward socialism.  Please!  Providing health care for all citizens is not socialism, it is our moral responsibility.  But Republicans have been on the train of prosperity for years without ever paying for a ticket.  They have gotten their free ride on the backs of every single hard working American citizen.  Now we have to face the problems that have been building and pay for our passage forward.  They don’t like that.  Paying one’s fair share and investing in the future is something they never had to do before.  It’s un-American.
• But the biggest lunacy is the “Republican Budget Alternative” which contained only 17 pages, no numbers, but to be filled in later.  The promise is a carefully crafted plan of tax cuts and capped spending to get the deficit under control.  Are these people lunatics?  The only thing keeping the economy off life support is spending by the federal government since both the States and our citizens are cutting back.  If you want to see our economy really go in the dumper, cut federal spending in a time when there is no other spending and more and more people are losing their jobs every day.  How does this compute on the “reality” scale?  But better yet is the idea of cutting taxes to save our budget and stimulate spending.  Even if businesses get a tax break, they are still going to layoff their employees if no one is buying.  Meanwhile with less money coming in, the deficit balloons.  Anybody remember the last eight years?
• Last but not least there is the RNC Chairman Michael Steele told who told CNN that he would contemplate a presidential run if God told him the time was right. He also claimed to have strategically planned his squabble with Rush Limbaugh, in which he called the radio talk show host’s work incendiary and ugly. See it is all in his master plan to end up in the loony bin.  The man is delusional.  Is this the best they have to offer?

So as we enter into some of the most important debates in our history to try to right our country, the opposition party is not making sense and has become irrational.  It is really sad when a whole national party is so wedded to their ideology that when circumstances change, they cannot adapt to change and just become totally irrelevant.  Problem is their irrelevancy is holding the rest of the nation back from our future.  Hopefully this is becoming abundantly clear.