When did “Republican” become this nations fall-back position?
January 11, 2010
It’s 2010, an “election year”, and as the Sunday News Shows were “eager” to point out, “two prominent Democratic Senators are retiring, Chris Dodd (CT) and Byron Dorgan (ND)”. Suddenly, the Democrats “Super-Majority” is in question. Really? As DNC Chairman Tim Kaine pointed out on several shows Sunday morning, while two Democratic Senators are retiring, SIX Republican senators are retiring. Did the pundits ask if Republicans were worried about becoming even more marginalized than they already are? No. They simply noted how “historically”, the party that retakes the White House “typically” loses seats in the following mid-term election.
So, naturally, after huge Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008 because Republicans were driving this country into a ditch, the country must be ready to “give up” on Democrats because they haven’t undone the monumental damage of the past 8 years in just three. Why? “Because history shows us”. Ignore the fact that a Republican president with Republican Congress doubled the national debt in just six years (after being handed a balanced budget), mired the country in two Trillion-dollar wars with no exit strategy, created an economy that was shedding over 700,000 jobs and 1000 stock-points a month by the time Bush left office less than one year ago, and then dumped the entire mess in the lap of Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress… ignore all that because “history shows us” that the country typically turns back to the people they voted out en masse to bail them out just two years into a new presidency.
Republicans are the Party that dug this hole we’re in. And now that we’re finally starting to see the top and almost out, are we really going to reach out to the guys with the shovels to pull us out? And yet somehow, the “Media” keeps telling us “this is a center-Right nation” (despite all evidence to the contrary) and when Democrats “fail” to fix everything overnight, the country will naturally gravitate back to the Republican Party.
How did “Republican” become this country’s “fall back” position in elections? It has seemed to me for quite a while that voters are very quick (too quick imho) to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt and have very little patients with Democrats. Yet, as CNN’s Chris Mathews so delicately pointed out last week, “What has the Republican Party done for the country in the last 20 years?” (cue: crickets).
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Ronald Reagan quadrupled the national debt in his eight years from $1T when he came in to $4T when he left. Bush-41 added another $1T in his four years. Clinton, for all his *personal* faults, shrank the debt, balanced the budget and left a surplus. “Dubya” then turned that surplus into the biggest deficit in history and more than *doubled* the National Debt by adding another $5T to it in under seven years. And now, all the Republican “teabaggers” screaming about “spending” never said “boo” in the eight years Bush-43 and the (six year) Republican controlled Congress ran up all this debt and destroyed the economy. Add to that his violations of the Constitution, warrantless wiretaps, “free-speech zones” and suspension of Habeas Corpus for American citizens, only to have these same Republicans apoplectic, claiming President Obama wants to turn this country into “the Soviet Union” because he wants to reform health insurance. One bright spot in this economy? Gun sales. All the gun nuts are stockpiling as many weapons as they can get their hands on “before President Obama tries to take their guns away” despite not introducing one single piece of gun control legislation since taking office. In fact, “gun control” was not even discussed on the campaign trail if memory serves. But you know who WAS a threat to gun ownership? George W. Bush and his “Patriot Act” that gave the government the right to invade your home without a warrant and seize your property… including/especially guns… without telling you they’ve done so or even providing you with a way to get them back. That seems very much like the kind of thing they accuse Democrats of wanting to do. But a Democrat didn’t do it, a Republican did. And did you see huge angry mobs of NRA members picketing the White House protesting the Bush Administration? No, of course not. Because (to them), President Bush “was one of them”.
And now, some people are actually considering putting Republicans back in power to undo the damage they themselves caused? How stupid are we?
It wasn’t always this way. When the economy collapsed in 1929 in the wake of rampant real-estate speculation with no regulation (sound familiar?), it elected Franklin Roosevelt, a Progressive Democrat, in 1932 to undo the damage. Four years later, in 1936, the economy was still a mess. Double-digit unemployment, people standing in soup-lines, but did the nation rush back to the Republican Party to rescue them? No, they re-elected FDR because they saw signs of progress. By the end of FDR’s second term (1940), The Great Depression was over (I hope to post video proof of this in coming weeks) and the country was strong enough to fight two wars (Germany & Japan) following the attack on Pearl Harbor nearly two years later.
But today, now that President Obama hasn’t undone 28 years of Conservative mayhem in just 12 months, we’re taking polls on whether people are ready to rush back to the people that created this mess in the first place??? The pundits argue that with huge majorities in both the House & Senate, everything that comes out of Washington is entirely the Democrats doing and Republicans are blameless.
As I’ve pointed out on here before, Democrats really haven’t had a “super-majority”. Between the 6 Conservative “blue-dogs” that vote like Republicans on taxes, healthcare, and stimulus spending, plus GOP mole Joe Lieberman who sits in on DNC meetings so he can then report back to his RNC masters everything that was said, at best Democrats have had only 52-53 semi-reliable Progressive votes in the Senate. And the lack of the classic “stand-up filibuster” means every vote of consequence now requires an unconstitutional 60 vote super majority (interesting link. It’s to a 2003 WSJ op/ed accusing Democrats of abusing the filibuster to block Supreme Court nominee Miguel Estrada. My how times change. – UPDATE: Mother Jones just released an article on the unconstitutionality of the sit-down filibuster.) RNC Chairman Michael Steele is currently promoting his new book subtitled: “12 Steps to Defeating the Obama Agenda”. Yes, Steele really did use an “Alcoholics Anonymous” metaphor to describe the Republican Party. And yes, the book is all about how “The Party of ‘No'” needs to say “No” more often rather than offer an alternative positive agenda of their own.
I ask again… how did “Republican” become this nations fall-back position?
Postscript: Because it is such an amazing example of Republican hypocrisy as well as an incredibly insightful piece of journalism, and has some bearing on what I’ve been saying above, this recent expose from The Rachael Maddow Show should serve as a clear reminder why we don’t want these people back in control of the government again:
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January 11, 2010
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