Republicans & Conservatives Archives

I hate it when John Adams is right.

Dylan, once again, is relevant.

His voice may be long gone to cigarettes, but his words struck a chord again with me in his White house performance.

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall

For he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled

There’s a battle outside and it’s ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the times they are a changin’.

A couple of notes to address complaints about the Senate bill from the left and the center. (There’s no use addressing complaints from the right; in general, the safest thing when dealing with crazy people is to avoid eye contact.)

P. Krugman

Eric, interesting and informative links well expect for the Stein link, the man can’t even get economics right and he claims to be one why would we trust him on anything else?

To hear you one would think this trend has just started on the Obama watch and has not been happening since the days of Nixon and Reagan. I guess if nothing else those on the right that thought so highly of the GWB era patriot act aren’t quite so sure now that they realize they won’t have a repub majority forever. The “it ain’t fascism when we do it” mindset of the extremist right wing has been trending the country in this direction for so long one has to wonder what do you expect when any attempt to curtail this abuse is meant with repub/conservative wailing’s of “soft on crime”.

The Proletariat! Why not just call yourself the working man, while you’re at it? It’s very interesting to hear you use socialist language, such 25 cent words to describe the people.

How about just calling ourselves the people?

It mystifies me that you keep on attacking Democrats for being more partisan when yours is the party that has taken obstruction to unprecedented levels.

It mystifies me that you keep on attacking Democrats on the budget when your party started most of the spending, on War, on Tax Cuts, on Medicare Part C and D, and just hid much of it off budget.

It mystifies me that you keep on attacking Democrats for invading privacy when yours was the Administration that justified much worse in the name of national security.

It mystifies me when you talk about the people rising up, because the people rose up against your party. They rose up to take you out of power, yet your people still try to force your status quo on everybody by blocking everything you can on a Party line vote.

I guess you only respect the “proletariat” once you’ve been able to lie and sow hysteria enough to confuse them into thinking Democrats are to blame for the impossibility of getting legislation, good or bad, through the Congress.

Republican Populism, let’s define it:

1) Selling people on Tax Cuts without cutting expenditures then complaining about the evils of deficit spending.

2) Vilifying the Stimulus plan, then going home to cut ribbons on projects paid for by it.

3) Selling people on Tax cuts to the Rich on the basis of trickle-down economics, then looking the other way as the corporations they own ship all the jobs overseas.

4) Angrily denouncing the intrusion of the Federal government in personal matters, while pushing against Gay Marriage, Gays in the Military, Abortion Rights, and, yes, villifying a provision in the healthcare bill that was intended to give people the ability to seek counseling on terminal care at Medicare’s expense.

That’s just a sampling. Republican Populism is standing up for elitist economic policy, for the rights of the already well-off and powerful, while giving the actual proletariat the shaft.

In other words, it’s BS, rhetoric cooked up to obscure the fact that most Republican Policy is based on the priorities of the gilded age and the roaring twenties: lower taxes on the rich, lower regulation on business, exclusion of organized labor, repeal of the New Deal, etc.

It’s all just a scam, a way of turning people against their own interests by distracting them with social issues and the occasional crowd-pleasing giveaway.

People need to realize, as I think Mass. residents are beginning to, that when you hand the Republicans another vote, it’s very unlikely that their interests are going to be seen to- it’s the interests of the GOP those Senators see too, not the “proletariat.”

Eric, the American people ARE ignorant, as are all people in the world. We are all ignorant, from the geniuses to those born without a cerebral cortex. We are all ignorant of more or less amounts of human knowledge acquired over the millenia. Whence comes the specialization of labor, to be found in the most primitive tribal groups to our most advanced societies.

It is the source of our interdependence, and reliance upon each other in ALL societies on Earth. It is also why anarchy is loathed by all societies on Earth. The people elect representatives trusting that they will know more about what to do on national or local objectives than we alone would. The people elect representatives to stay off anarchy. The people elect representatives to work to solve the challenges, they alone cannot. It is called democracy, Eric. In general, flawed as it is, it remains the best form of government in human history overall.

In the U.S. the majority of voters trusted Republicans from 2001 to 2009, and found their trust abused and unwarranted. Having no other choice, they trusted Democrats with governing the nation’s challenges and needs. NOT having an election yet, since Democrats assumed majority control, it IS too soon to say whether the majority’s trust has been earned by Democrats or not. The polls cannot make this determination because it takes time to change things in government, especially ours, and especially when the minority Party ABUSES the filibuster in unprecedented fashion. But, Nov. 2, 2010 will arrive, and we will then know what the majority think and believe about handing their trust to Democrats.

In the absence of civil war or revolution in the streets, the people are governable, and further, they are governable by majority choice. Sorry, if that reality rankles the minority. Get over it, or get out. Our government is elected by the majority (electoral college excepted). Don’t like the majorities choice, live with it, or live somewhere else. American does NOT prevent citizens from leaving for better prospects, elsewhere.

But, the people ARE aware of how giving free rein to capitalism and corporations devastated their pensions, 401K’s, and jobs. Oh, YES! The American people are very aware of these consequences of Republican rule. Their memories may be short, but, not so short as to forget it was a decade of Republican initiatives that wrought these difficult times upon our nation. That is TRUE Consciousness, though, regrettably, roughly a third of the population does not share in it, blinded as they are by the spin and misinformation of their tribal leaders in the GOP.

Eric said: “The answer is, of course, more government intervention in order to combat the lies of big business and root out all the false consciousness out there.”

Thank you Eric, for reinforcing the awareness of readers that Republicans are anti-government and anti-America. The majority chose Obama, and the majority still approve of his being president. Some Republicans deplore this concept of majority elections as your comment above demonstrates. The minority which disagrees however, engages in the most obvious lie of all, that their views represent that of the majority, in clear contradiction to the elections which spoke objectively as to the majority of voter’s choice.

Funny, how I don’t remember your position and comments against government and American elections or the majority being the same when Bush was reelected in 2004. Is this contradiction perhaps motivated by subjective and partisan hypocrisy?

Republicans did more of what you now complain about than Democrats have to date. They grew the size, and cost of government through the roof, they governed as if the people did not matter, well, the non-wealthy people to be precise. They governed as if the corporations would take of the nation’s ills, privatizing our military operations, our wars, and trying to privatize our social security system, and privatizing the management of public lands, and privatizing the oversight and regulation of corporations to those very same corporations.

The cost of these Republican measures now amount to trillions and trillions of dollars of losses for the American people, America’s economy, and present and future tax payers. And all the while the top 2 percent of the wealthiest in America acquired even greater accumulation of wealth through Republicans transfers of tax dollars to these wealthiest.

You do realize that you, a Republican, is writing about the Stupid American people, and that Democrats and Independents do not write or speak in these terms at all, don’t you? Guess not!

Eric wrote: “The irony is that throughout the entire effort to ‘Reform Healthcare’ Obama left it to Pelosi and Reid to do the sausage making and they collectively realized that the less said about what was in that sausage the better.”

Finally an almost completely true statement. Obama did leave the legislation to Pelosi and Reid, and that has proved to be unfruitful for the American people. But, I must remind you, that our Constitution did not establish a dictatorship to command the Congress, it established the Congress to do the legislating and the President to enforce such legislation. You now seem to want to criticize what? Obama for following the Constitution or the Constitution itself for not reinstating King George and his successors?

Some Republican defenders get so confused on Constitutional matters, and need all the education their betters amongst citizens can provide. Not surprising however when their leaders like Cheney and Bush and Gonzalez treat the Constitution as an obstacle in the way to be dodged and undermined and ignored. Some forbearance is therefore due these Republican defenders. They were taught by terrible teachers like Cheney and Bush.

And here Eric provides us with the classic example of that psychological term, Projection, when Eric says: “What Obama, Pelosi, and Reid represent is the worst in paternalistic governance.”

Projection is taking one’s own traits and projecting them upon others as a defense of owning them oneself. Thank you, Eric, for this opportunity to expose this oft misunderstood defense mechanism regularly engaged in by debaters of politics.

And thank you Eric, for this demonstration of classic anti-government, anti-America, anti-democracy thinking that runs through the Republican Party these days in calling for Revolution against this democratically elected government:

Still, I predict that the people will rise up. The American proletariat are not going to continue to labor under the yoke of their oppressors for long.

Eric further says: “Ordinary Americans, everyday people, are the government.” But, that is code language for the minority who lost their majority in the last two elections. Sophisticated slight of hand in Eric’s comment here, as he disguises the frustration and disappointment of the Republicans by projecting them as the majority ordinary, everyday people, who in fact, chose this Obama and Democratically controlled Congress.

Well done, Eric. The sophistry in your writing rivals that of GW Bush’s previous salesman and slight of hand artist, Karl Rove. No one can say you are not intelligent and capable of learning, that’s for sure. Your teachers, however, leave a lot to be desired :-)

Eric,
Nice try; however, I do believe you mean Stupid American Management. For unless you are willing to admit that the Kids (Labor) gas caused the Banks to fail, Auto Makers to lose money, and a list that goes on forever than the blame for Americas’ Failure for the last decade has to rest in the laps of CEOs and Top Management.

For example; Katrina did wreck the production of fuel and sent gasoline prices soaring. Yet, unlike the Federal Government who has made room for storage of crude oil I do not see where any of the Oil Companies thought enough a head to see that the day would come that they needed their own source of reserves to weather the storm.

So who are you going to blame for that boneheaded move? Your Proletariat or the Top Management for not looking out for the Inherent Best Interest of the Corporation and Their Stockholders.

What to say ? You are most probably correct in your prediction that “the people will rise up” to attempt a return to the “republic” that our forefathers delivered to us and applied the onus upon us “the people” to keep. The form which this uprising will take hopefully will not require the blood of our sons and daughters but until “the people” of the United States are mad enough at the “ruling class” to be willing to shed blood, change for the better will not occur. This is not to say such change in our government would require bloodshed, as I believe our system of government is still viable, only that the passion of “the people” must be inflamed to the point of educating themselves in their choices of representatives and vote accordingly. We must reclaim the education system to correctly teach the lessons of our history so as not to make the same mistakes other countries have in following the errors of socialism. We must not continue watering down our republic with socialist policies and programs that have the effect of making lazy “the people” and providing disincentive (over taxing) to their aspirations to become wealthy.