Stick It To The GOP

I don’t write that much about politics here unless something enrages me beyond control – I mean everybody with half a brain can see that the Republicans and Bush have done an awful job in actually serving the people of this country. Their successes seem to be confined to serving their corporate bankrollers by cutting taxes to the wealthy, plundering and destroying the environment and attacking worker’s rights. The Bush administration’s cleverness in spinning news, extending Republican power and extending executive power to absolute heights has been matched only by their utter inability to handle domestic calamities or conduct competent foreign policy. There’s no question about this – it’s on every page of the newspaper except the editorial one. Faced with such a preponderance of facts, conservative "intellectuals" (there’s an oxymoron) have had to perform increasingly risible conceptual gymnastics to try and justify intelligent (as opposed to simply emotional) support for Bush and his rubberstamp Congressional love slaves.

Case in point: Cal Thomas’s absurd column urging his readers to "Stick with the GOP." Its very first sentence exposes the multiple misstatements which must be made in order to defend his beloved party – "Republicans have a fair story to tell about what they’ve accomplished the last two years…." The last two years!!?? Republicans have had complete control over every branch of government since the fateful election of 2000 and the country is far from better because of it. The economy is far worse than in the Clinton years and we are mired in a disastrous war that we have no hope of "winning," that was fobbed on the public under false pretenses and which has in fact undermined its putative purpose, the fight against Al-Qaeda. This is a common Republican tactic. They act as if they’ve just been elected and have only just begun to undo the Democratic stain. They blame the government when they ARE the government, and if all else fails point a finger Bill Clinton, whose influence must be vast to extend so far into the future, negating the three Republican presidents who have served EIGHTEEN YEARS before and after him. Even old Cal has to admit that the negligible efforts of this session of Congress can at best be called fair, unless he means fair as in Fox’s "fair and balanced," in which case it is a word that’s lost its original meaning.

Cal sticks to the Rove talking points in defending the economy and the deficit which has temporarily been reduced from unimaginably huge to merely obscenely huge. It’s funny that commentators like him find Bush blameless when gas prices are high, but give him credit when they’re (again temporarily) lower. The funniest contortion he makes is in justifying the tax cuts for huge corporations by saying "they are taxed at lower rates, giving them increased incentive to earn bigger profits." (Pause for laughter). SINCE WHEN DO BUSINESSES NEED MORE INCENTIVE TO EARN BIGGER PROFITS? As a merchant I can tell you that the obvious is true – the idea of business IS to earn bigger profits and fair taxes do NOTHING to inhibit this. Wasn’t there a boom in the Clinton years when these "discouraging" taxes were in effect? For me, this is the reason why boneheads like Cal are allowed to spout, and the whole reason for propaganda networks like Fox News. Big Corporations don’t want to pay their share of taxes and support the party that doesn’t demand it of them by large contributions and their sponsorship of apologists for that party. I’ll even go on to say that a lot of the blind support for the quagmire in Iraq is fueled not because the corporations really believe in the neo-cons baloney, but because they want to keep the party that gives them special privileges in power.

Cal’s next "point" is also from the Rove play book, as haltingly articulated by Bush in his recent press conference – Republicans can "better defend the country." He demonizes the Democrats for being so cowardly as to defend the constitutional rights of suspected "terrorists" and being morally opposed to indiscriminate torture. He commits another lame piece of sophistry when he says that at Guantanamo "detainees are treated better than they could expect if they were detained in their homelands." While the factual basis of this statement is questionable, it’s the philosophy behind it that is really troubling. Is that the standard now, that we treat our prisoners better than third world despots? Is that what America has come to under the "values" administration of George Bush? I’m sorry, you can call me unpatriotic, but I’ve always believed that America was different, that we operated under a system of laws, of judicial balances, of enlightened humanity in our relations with others. I don’t care how despicable or "evil" you make out our enemy to be, the fact that we recognize these things is what separates us from them, is why we are NOT them. It’s also ironic that the commentators who were so livid about "moral relativity" are now so very relative in their moral pronouncements – i.e. our treatment of prisoners is relatively humane.

Then there’s Cal screed that this election is about "survival." If the mightiest country on earth with the most dominant culture can have its very survival threatened by a handful of terrorists committing one horrific act FIVE YEARS AGO then we really are a paper tiger. Then he quotes an "irrefutable fact about the importance of winning in Iraq" by the obscure pundit Mark Steyn that "being seen not to run – or, if you prefer, being seen to show ‘resolve’ – should be the indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy." I find this less than "irrefutable" – in other words, strategic, tactical or even logical factors should not be taken into account. Forget reality based foreign policy, our only goal should be to show resolve and not appear to run. Wouldn’t having our troops dig big holes in the desert and then fill them up again for ten years show equally well that we won’t cut and run? Wouldn’t having marines march off cliffs like lemmings also display impressive resolve to the impressionable world? Steyn is also quoted as saying that the losses we’ve suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq are "pinpricks," a view I am sure the families of the servicemen who have unnecessarily died would not agree with, not to mention the staggering civilian casualties which as we all know are not part of the equation, following the Administration’s logic for "detainees" – if they ain’t American Republicans they ain’t human. And if our casualties are a pinprick, then so were the deaths at 9/11, which they have now eclipsed, the very same 9/11 attack which was the seismic event that precipitated this global war in the first place.

Cal concludes with the usual conflation of Iraq with a worldwide fight with an entity known as Terrorism, which has followed Communism as the all purpose boogeyman to justify any and all of Conservative actions. They prefer the World War Two analogy however, as if these Terrorists are comparable to the Axis powers and that fighting in Iraq is just a step in a larger war, like the invasion of Normandy or Iwo Jima. Anyone who has given even the briefest glance to the conflict in Iraq will see that it has NOTHING to do with 9/11. Not only did the government of Iraq not have WMD’s (and how quickly many have forgotten and forgiven that deception) they were active enemies of Al-Qaeda, and it’s our invasion that has given the terrorists a foothold in that country. But the war there isn’t really about them, it’s a civil war between Shia, Sunni and Kurd, a conflict that is not about to "follow us home," or be recreated in our backyard. Pulling out wouldn’t deliver Iraq to a terrorist hegemony who are bent on invading our country and defeating us. We are not fighting an terrorist army but local factions who do not hate freedom, or country or anything but our continued occupation and each other. This is not World War Two but Vietnam redux, and although pulling out there precipitated an awful human tragedy (which probably wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t gone in in the first place) it did not cause a Vietnamese invasion of America, or indeed a worldwide Communist victory.

The final crack-up in Cal’s comedy routine is that, after a paragraph in which we hear how the Terrorists are total fanatics committed to the death to defeat us and stamp out our freedom he says a Democratic victory will "validate their view and encourage them to fight harder," as if the very relentless monsters he’s just been describing are guests on Dr. Phil who would really blossom in their horribleness if only they got a little validation and encouragement by America’s decision to no longer be a one state country and reestablish the checks and balances that have made our freedom mean something other than a rhetorical device we have to surrender to protect.

I have a theory that somehow after Bush was sort of elected we entered a parallel universe in which the United States we know and love became some sort of Bizarro country with Bizarro #1 at the controls guiding us straight down the rabbit hole shouting "stay the course, stay the course." The worst part of this bad dream is that there’s only a small group of citizens who seem to actually give a damn or follow current events, while most people believe the clearly specious arguments of people like Cal, or the television commercials the corporations pay for (and I include Fox News as an infomercial for the Bush administration), or somehow believe it’s their Christian duty to vote Republican. After the last few elections it’s getting harder to conclude that people really want good government, and our hopes have been dashed so many times that it’s getting hard to think that we’ll ever recover from the nightmare. All I know is that I’ll be in that booth election day and although I don’t know how the Republicans plan to steal this election I’ll be voting and I hope you do too.

YR PAL,

UBU