The Republicans are offering bullshit and circuses instead of bread and circuses to distract the people from their failure to govern.

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The 100 AD poet Juvenal used the phrase bread and circuses to characterize the Roman politicians attempt to manipulate the citizens by distracting them from the politicians venality, corruption and ultimate failure. The Republicans are doing the same thing, except that they are taking away the bread part and offering instead, bullshit. With the complicity of the media.

Of the 11 items listed in the latest news column on my home page, 6 were about some guy getting married in England, a report on styles and fashions, the doings of a musician, and the travails of some sports figures. The other 5 were about foreign countries.

Nothing about the ongoing Republican economic catastrophe that has created severe hardship for millions of people. Nothing about the Republican's plans to continue with policies that caused and will continue to worsen those conditions.

The lead article in the New York Times and the Washington Post are consistently about some sports game. With photographs of burly millionaires dressed up in shiny costumes cavorting about in pursuit of some kind of ball.

Rick Perry, the apparently El Supremo for Life of Texas, is a good example of this substitution of bullshit and withdrawing bread in the phrase bread and circuses.

Perry preaches against any kind of government interference, taking a supposedly principled stand against accepting government funds for anything. At the same time, he has succeeded in his desperate efforts to remain on the Texas government payroll as a way of making his living as governor of Texas. Such blatant, overt hypocrisy is beyond description.

Perry wants to withdraw Texas from the federal/state funded Medicaid program that provides health care for 3.1 million indigent Texans, including 2.3 million children. The total Medicaid cost is $24.7 billion, of which $16.6 billion is provided by the federal government. That's 67% of the total bill, leaving Perry with $8.1 billion to cover what it costs $24.7 billion to cover.

So, how's he going to do it? Obviously, he can't, it's impossible. More bullshit and circuses.

Perry has had a request for a four year waiver from the federal Medicaid program that is contingent on his plan meeting the Medicaid coverage requirements. In four years, he hasn't been able to come up with a plan to do that, and his opt out has been denied.

Taking into account the Libertarian/Republican ideology of "You're on your own," professed by Libertarians and Republicans who are in a financial position that they will never have to suffer from the consequences of being on their own, such as Ron and Rand Paul and Rick Perry, the subtext in Perry's desire to withdraw from Medicaid is not about getting rid of the Medicaid program.

It's about the effect it will have, getting rid of all those lazy, refuse to work, sit back and draw unemployment, live off the government scumbags and lowlifes. Perry knows full well that the effect of what he wants to do will remove more than two million from the Medicaid program. And that's his unspoken, desired result.

Remove the bread and substitute bullshit. You know, just between us good Republicans, that's what will happen. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Andy Harris, newly elected Republican member of congress is outraged that the government provided health care he spent months railing against to get elected is not available to him and his family right now, today. He has to wait until February first for it to take effect. The very same program he said he was against to get elected, he now can't wait to get his grubby hands on. More unspeakable hypocrisy.

Glenn Beck, without doubt America's Number One Clown in the bullshit and circuses takeover of the media, has attacked George Soros, blaming him for taking part in implementing the holocaust. In an article at County Fair, Simon Macy writes, accurately, that Beck attacked Soros, a Jew, by invoking "puppet masters," and "blood suckers."

About this, Macy writes that, "We're in uncharted territory here."

Actually, this territory was thoroughly charted, described, measured and delineated definitively between 80 to 75 years ago by some guys named Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Herman Goering and Adolph Hitler. They said exactly the same things about the Jews that Glenn Beck is invoking, with the well known catastrophic results.

There is no reason to expect that Glenn Beck's bullshit and circuses program (pogrom) will have any different result than that of those who have preceded him throughout history with their own pogroms against the Jews.

Since I don't watch TV, I have never actually seen Glenn Beck perform. There's more than enough of him everywhere else. But, in the unlikely event that this article will reach you who are outside the OpEdNews liberal/progressive spectrum, if you turn on the bullshit and circuses to be found on TV and tune into Glenn Beck's circus, I sincerely hope that you will make the connection to what Beck is doing with what those aforementioned leaders of the Third Reich did. It's exactly the same.

While it's true that Glenn Beck necessarily has to act out of ignorance, in this case his dishonesty, hypocrisy and anti-Semitism are the same: overt and blatant. He has access to the same information you and I have that refutes, denies and makes a lie of what he says, and he refuses to access it for accuracy.

It's bullshit that is the basis of his circus performance. The shame of it is that it pays so very well.

Authors Bio:
Ed Martin is an ordinary person who is recovering from being badly over-educated. Born in the middle of the Great Depression, he is not affiliated with nor a member of any political, social or religious organization. He is especially interested in the phenomenon of those who view the glaringly obvious with total incomprehension, in other words, out political, social and religious leaders.