The GOP Congressional leaders' intent now clear. Their open purpose is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new Obama Administration (and the American economy as well). They want create more failure. And they can't wait to try and pin it on the Democrats.
Even now, after the last eight years and even in a recession as steeply dangerous as this one they seek to actively sabotage, deride and insult the new President, now that their party is out of the White House.
To be sure there are legitimate debates to be had; but they prefer the cynicism and surrealism of total political war unilaterally declared on a brand new president, elected by a clear majority of the American people for the purpose of changing GOP failed policies and national mismanagement.
After repeated recent rejection by the Republicans of Obama’s overtures offer of bi-partisanship, we can now be in no doubt about what kind of people the GOP Obama-haters really are.
The mountain of partisan vitriol they intend to spew against Obama they fervently hope will force him to climb a steep hill of resistance made steep by GOP obstructionism, every day, without letup, for at least the next four or conceivably longer if Obama is re-elected.
The GOP has now adopted the model of that lead character in the movie "Judge Dredd," played by Silvester Stallone wherein they intend to become JUDGE, JURY AND possibly even EXECUTIONER of this president, without waiting for any discussion, just going immediately to a trumped up public verdict of "no-confidence" and "guilty-as-charged" vis a vis the Democratic party.
Never mind that these partisan USA-wrecking-ball-hacks have zero credibility and even fewer credentials to do so.
Obama might still be intent on ‘reaching out’ to the Republicans, but Republican participation will not return the favor and will always have as first priority the sabotaging of his administration.
In the process of reaching out, I hope that Obama has a strategy in place to disarm the GOP's hand grenades and dodge the scorpion stingers of Messieurs Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, Corker and the rest.
Obama-bashing has become their profession. It's what they do. That's their agenda. Never mind the needs of the American people.
From the Clinton years, we can see that the GOP’s history has been such that no Democrat, no matter who, has ever been treated fairly by them.
The GOP has, especially after the tenure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, been a party of highly fanatic, non-negotiating, hard-right berzerker reactionaries with a nasty, prevaricating brand of mean-spirited slander and an unyielding ideological hard-right approach to every issue. They are completely unfair, implacable and of course revisionist in all their overweeningly partisan stances on any and all issues of the day.
This party of the rigid lockstep has again offered a clear expression of this just lately.
Take the Judd Gregg withdrawal from nomination for the post of the Department of Commerce as an example of the GOP demand for lockstep party marching orders
When Judd Gregg approached the Obama administration to see if he could be a part of it, he was assuming that his own party wasn't going to adopt a policy of total warfare against the newly elected president in a time of enormous economic peril.
Between that moment and the current all-out ideological assault on Obama, Gregg's position became untenable. His recusal on the stimulus package provoked fury at home and dyspepsia among the GOP who were and are intent on responding to an open hand with a clenched fist. Mitch McConnell, among others, read Gregg the riot act and told him to step away from Obama ‘and the liberals policies’ or else.
I have to say that even I am a little taken aback by the force of the anti-Obama Republican assault. Even in an economic downturn as swift and alarming as this one, and even after an election that clearly brought the Republicans a clear vote of popular disfavor, with close to 60 percent of the American public voting against the GOP, and even after the most conciliatory efforts by any incoming president in memory, these GOP mad-dogs have gone to all out war against the president before he has even had a month in office.
The Republicans’ wild cuckoo (to borrow a Gore Vidal metaphor used against William F. Buckley Jr.) is evidently coming out after the election of Barack Obama, an eventuality which they feared and hated even from the outset of his candidacy. Now that he’s in office, they are going bazonkers.
The president is staying cool but he should not so cool that he keeps going back and offering the hand of bipartisanship to people who clearly want to bite that hand extended to them.
Clearly, the rest of us should realize what motivates the GOP: their hatred of progressive policies, their being in bed with large corporate interests, their total and cynical political opportunism and their selectively sculpted talking points that disguise their right-wing, anti-little-guy-ideology cloaking it in phony populist rhetoric.
These naysayers want no part of anything Obama is behind, and much less a stimulus bill which offers average people any assistance, and has maybe a sixty percent chance of lessening or reversing the current economic downturn if given time to work.
They want Obama to fail so they can ride the public discontent they intend to whip up back into power. Plus, it is against their nature and their religion to strengthen in any way the social safety net or to help average Americans and/or small mom-and-pop businesses get their fair share of tax cuts, that under Bush were offered only to the super rich.
They want no tax breaks for low-income families with children; no help for college students; no help for those needing extended unemployment benefits because they were made jobless by Republican policies over the last eight years. In short, nothing for average people, absolutely nothing that doesn’t go to Wall Street fat cats or large corporations.
All spending on average Americans is considered 'wasteful, pork-laden spending'. These same 'lawmakers' who busted the American budget during their fourteen year reign of terror in Congress, first under Newt Gangrene’s ‘Contract Against America” and then during for the last eight years of the Bush Administration....these same lawmakers whose policies wasted 6 trillion on quagmire wars, fat cat crony-capitalism benefitting only corporate captains who were recipients of boondoggle giveaways and incompetent government handouts with glaring lack of oversight and consumer protection and corrupt sweetheart contracts with unregulated corporations….. now these same plunderers of the public trust declare themselves to be the big experts on what will “grow the economy” and they have declared anything Obama and the Democrats ‘anathema’.
They care not that the Obama’s stimulus package would have millions of workers see a little extra money in their weekly paychecks and thousands of small businesses that have been operating in the red get a greater share of the tax refunds. The GOP fanatically and very simply wants the average citizen deprived of any help.
Fortunately these ‘sudden-converts-to-being-pork police’ are not really prevailing in their talking points. These “RepubiCANTs” don't have quite enough votes to seriously hobble Obama’s advantage in a Democratically controlled Congress, and because of their electoral weakness most of the public works projects and middle-class-working-poor-tax cuts for families and individuals have been somewhat preserved despite the GOP’s best efforts to destroy them.
The obstructionists did manage to extract as the price for three of their party defecting to Obama, did manage to get a number of public education and help for states parts of the bill reduced, or eliminated, but still not nearly enough for the stimulus bill to be to their liking.
OK, so here’s what Obama ought to do in response to this all out assault and lack of bi-partisanship on the part of the GOP… what he ought to do if the backstabbing Republicans want to continue to play hardball is take a chapter out of George W. Bush’s book and himself play partisan hardball.
Obama can re-direct finances and resources away GOP congressional leaders’ states and districts by a combination of the veto (or selective use of the line item veto) and of executive orders.
Also he needs to schedule frequent ‘fireside’ chats with the American people, and explain who is obstructing their economic recovery and why what he, Obama, proposes is helpful.
He also ought to explain to the public that since he tried bi-partisanship and the Republican refuse to reciprocate, he cannot be accused of breaking campaign promises if he is being forced by the Republican intransigence to govern in much the same way as George W. Bush did.
It is obvious that RepubliCANTS are seeking to abrogate, annul and reverse the results of the last election and get their way forced back onto the American people with, of course, the invaluable assistance of their allies in the monopolistic corporate-owned mainstream news media who trumpet GOP talking points 24/7 and give the GOP the predominant and loudest public microphone.
Republicans want to make sure America has no recovery. And they want to make their leader the chief right wing radio slander-jock and nay-sayer, none other than Porkulus Maximus Limbaugh, the pig-jowled, pinch-eyed, plenipotentiary of puke radio, who seeks to carve out his kingdom of liberal-bashing by guiding his GOP-ditto-bots into a replay of the Clinton-bashing years, playing the constantly updated game of ‘get the Democrat’ and behaving like the jonesing drug fiend he is who never has enough of hate mongering and helping the villain-super-rich rape and pillage gang that has ruined our country.
Blame the Democrats and actively obstruct every policy proposed by the new Administration over the next four years or longer should he be re-elected.
If they can get Obama to fail, these self-fashioned ‘lib-terminators’ think they can regain power and finish demolishing what is left of the USA, like the savages on the Capital One commercials demolish a department store.
The GOP and its partisans need to be kicked to the curb, just like the new GOP chairman recently said he wants to do with any opponents of his policies.
The GOP needs its own medicine and have a bit put in their mouths and a bridle reining in their excessive propaganda power over the airwaves.
And one good place to start is to re-institute the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and the ‘Equal Time’ provision, so that the Republicans conglomerate-driven media megaphone can’t keep up this monopolistic forcing of GOP talking points onto the public consciousness while Democrats are trivialized and made to look ridiculous and their policies are portrayed as failure right out of the box.
The Fairness Doctrine would put much needed balance into the conglomerate-right-leaning media’s dominance of public discourse with only the GOP point of view, and prevent them from surreptitiously foisting on us all their right wing agenda under the guise of pseudo-objective news programs that follow GOP talking points down to even the typographical errors.
The Repukes have indeed lost their minds and are crazy with rage because Obama is calmly debunking their lies, rising above their attacks and by his patient reminder that he was put into office to fix the mess made by the previous years of Republican malfeasance.
And if the public wants it fixed, they need to ignore the falsehoods the Republicans are putting out. Just the contrast between the decency of Obama and the scurrilous incivility of the GOP leaders is making the Republicans look, to any reasonable person like the small, lying, petty and absolutely failed hypocrites they are.
They're frantically trying anything they can to counter Obama, grabbing propaganda from anywhere they can, irrespective of the public will to have a fix for what is broken.
The GOP doesn’t give a rat’s rip about our country or our future. Oh they pretend to champions of public morality and the public purse, but the only people who don’t see through their rhetoric are those members of the cult who don’t want to be bothered with reality.
They are die-hards, content to be brainwashed by the liars and corporate pushers of the RNC, regardless of the damage it does to a sinking country.
Trading in fear, slander and anti-progressive backwardness they wish Obama no good, and hebut he will sooner or later have to face the fact that civility won’t buy the respect of these hard noses.
The Republican rump doesn’t respond to reason or civility. Their goals and agenda are all they care about.
