October 6, 2008

Why Do Republicans Hate America?

 

It wasn’t really a surprise when George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their neocon accomplices exploited the tragedy of September 11 to lead the nation into a disastrous, unprovoked and morally indefensible war of aggression in the oh-so-coincidentally oil-rich nation of Iraq.

 

Nor was it especially shocking when this same administration exploited the same tragedy to ramrod through a succession of Constitution-gutting pieces of legislation – the FISA bill, the Patriot Act, Patriot II – designed to subvert a baker’s dozen of the previously inalienable rights Americans had held dear.

 

And who can claim astonishment that this same administration would, over the course of eight disastrous years, preside over the savaging of the environment, the corruption of the U.S. attorney system and the federal judiciary, the doubling of the national debt and the irreversible diminishment of America’s standing in the eyes of virtually all of its global neighbors?

 

This is, after all, Republicans doing what Republicans have always done – unflinchingly serving their twin masters of power and profit, pursuing both at all costs regardless of the consequences to the nation or the people that they pretend to love. Since the Nixon era, Republicans have known that they could get the American public to accept even the most egregious, exploitative and downright insane polices and practices, provided they were sufficiently cloaked in obfuscating layers of patriotism and paranoia.

 

No matter what abyss the GOP was leading America into at any given moment, Americans could be assured that the “liberal” alternative was far, far worse, and that we would thank them for it later. All that Americans asked in turn was to be left alone in their suburban tract houses with their Toro lawnmowers, their color TVs and American Idol.

 

At long last, even this final, trivial trust is betrayed. In the unending quest to ratchet up the scale and scope of their failure, the Bush Administration and its Wall Street paymasters have succeeded both in initiating the Great Global Depression of 2009 and in forcing Americans to pony up $700 billion to reward them for it. Nearly a decade of deregulated, globalized Cowboy Capitalism has already led a succession of once stalwart Wall Street names into receivership, and the malaise has spread to banks in Europe and Asia. A “bailout package” amounting to over $3,600 of assumed debt for every man, woman and child, the proceeds slated to reward the same corrupt banking elite who initiated the manufactured “crisis,” is proudly presented as the necessary stopgap solution even as these same individuals are foreclosed out of their homes in mounting numbers.

 

The fiscal morass of the present day is the failure of the Republican ideology not only writ large, but spray-painted across the entire American landscape in neon-colored letters. Indisputable, abject, total failure. The failure of a party to live up to its professed ideals; the failure of its ideologues to back up their crazed concepts with workable policy; the failure of leaders to lead; the failure of their rank and file to recognize their own ignominious failure, even as it stares them full in the face. All of this is bad enough as it stands.

 

Not content to savage the country they profess to love, Republicans now feel the need to also insult it. If this dismal party had any remaining pride or self-respect, it would acknowledge its own spectacular inadequacy, retreat back under the rock it emerged from and leave the management of their mess to other, more capable hands. Instead, the GOP has the audacity to actually tout the wretched likes of John McCain and Sarah Palin – the former one of the principal architects of this mess, the latter blithely incapable of beginning to comprehend it – as serious candidates for public office.

 

The unstated message is clear: Regardless of how badly the Republicans have abused their power and position, they consider themselves entitled – whether by virtue of wealth, birth or will of God – to maintain it, even if doing so means that the country they pretend to love crumbles to rubble beneath their feet. The legions of automata that elected George W. Bush to two disastrous terms in office would rather chop holes in the floor of their last lifeboat rather than permit a black man, Barack Obama, to row it safely to shore.

 

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

 

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