Republicans and Their Rebranded Product The Teabaggers Finally Embrace Big Government
For more than a year now, we've been hearing from Republicans, tea party people and Glenn Beck's chalkboard about how big government is destroying American liberty and freedom. Much of the shrieking is literally accompanied by the yellow Revolutionary War "Don't Tread on Me" flag.
Every tea party lawn concert and misspelled sign regatta features people dressed in colonial drag with tea bags dangling from their tri-corner hats, waving banners in support of tax cuts, liberty and freedom and against the allegedly tyrannical Obama government. They're really scared and they want their country back from the (somehow) black liberal Nazi.
We've heard about how the "czars" are unconstitutional, even though the name "czars" was invented by the press as clever pseudonym for "advisers."
We've heard about how the Recovery Act, which has created hundreds of thousands of jobs and cut taxes for 95 percent of working families, is unconstitutional and an attack on states' rights and individual liberty. We've heard about how it's "generational theft" for the government to spend money to solve an economic crisis. We've heard about how the tax cuts in the Recovery Act are just a scam and should be returned to the government in protest.
We've heard about the crazy conspiracy theories involving the IRS invading our neighborhoods with armed goon squads -- rounding up anyone who purchased one of Glenn Beck's dozens of McBooks. Of course this meme turned out to be entirely untrue as there is no enforcement mechanism in the health care reform law should you simply choose not to pay the tax penalty for not buying insurance.
Republican attorneys general across the nation are challenging the health care law in court because, they say, it's unconstitutional. House minority leader John Boehner once called the bill "Armageddon" because of the tax penalty for Americans who choose not to buy insurance. Armageddon!
Throughout all of the misinformed and contradictory right-wing antics of the past year, I've been wondering how post-Bush Republicans and conservatives can possibly square all of their newly found affinity for freedom, liberty and the Constitution considering their eight year support for Bush era policies. Policies like illegal wiretaps of American citizens, the USA Patriot Act, suspension of habeas corpus (it's in the Constitution) and all the rest of it.
Have they at long last abandoned their support for these obvious trespasses against liberty and the Constitution? In fact, Glenn Beck said recently that he failed to speak out back then but, "It doesn't matter. I'm here now." Convenient timing. History appears to have skipped the first decade of the 21st century.
Put another way, are the Republicans suddenly joining up with civil libertarians to denounce policies that infringe upon basic constitutional rights? Maybe Rush Limbaugh teaming up with the ACLU during his drug case was a sign of things to come. A civil liberties-oriented conservative movement, eh?
Not a chance in hell.
This week, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said about the failed Times Square car bomb suspect, "Did they Mirandize him? I know he's an American citizen but still."
I know he's an American citizen but still. This easily catapults to the top of the list of awful, creepy, dangerous things Republicans have said in the context of terrorism since 9/11 -- the same list that includes: "None of your civil liberties matter much if you're dead," and, "I have had it with members of your party undermining our troops, undermining a commander in chief while we are at war."
Republicans love freedom and liberty or so they say. When forced to define exactly what they mean you can't get much more than garbled empty platitudes. The Conservatives of today - judged by the facts are remarkably like the the authoritarians they claim to be fighting against.
How We Get Out of the Great Depression II
Here we go again: Hoover got us in, and WWII got us out. Bush got us in, and
to his credit, started trying to get us out. Though, mostly he threw money at bankers.
In the Great Depression, Roosevelt tried deficit spending, but he was too timid. Then he stopped in 1937 and the economy nose-dived. It took the humongous deficits of WWII to pull us out of the Great Depression. Those deficits blasted the economy from depression into overdrive.
Of course after the war, we had to pay off a huge national debt, but during that time, from 1946 to 1980, the economy was mainly quite prosperous. We hit a bad recession when Reagan took office, and his early deficit spending made sense (though he didn't know it). But then he continued to drive up the debt through the boom years that followed. That didn't make any sense.
We are now headed into the worst slump since 1938, and you better hope Obama can fix it because that was not a pretty time. Unfortunately, as in the Great Depression, the extreme conservatives would rather trash the country than have our government succeed. They are much worse than Bush.
