AMERICA'S DOMESTIC COLD WAR

In the throes of the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama to be President of the United States, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell declared that the number one priority of his party would be to make Obama a one-term president.  Suddenly, jobs were no longer on their radar.  McConnell’s declaration came at a major GOP confab wherein the policy of the party would be to oppose any legislation that Barack Obama supported.

This deliberate sabotage of an American presidency, at the expense of the safety, well-being and prosperity of the American people and the American economy is unprecedented.  Not only has the congressional GOP, at the behest and urging of the talking heads in the right-stream media, been willing to default on the national debt for the first time in the nation’s history, they are  also willing to allow the destruction of President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system and  they have been willing to increase the ease with which companies can poison and pollute our air and water with little or no consequence.  But these Republicans are not willing to come to the aid of their friends, neighbors and countrymen in the seemingly unending carnage of weather related natural disasters.  And their only solution to curing the deficit and national debt is to inflict as much pain and suffering on those who can least withstand it while asking not a dimes worth of sacrifice from those who would not feel the pain of a pin prick.

While the GOP concern over the deficit and its long term effect on the nation’s people is noble and commendable, the reality is very different.  They would empty the vault to Fort Knox to fund construction of a massive southwestern US wall or to send our military men and women off to foreign conflicts with no reasonably discernable goal – yet when those same men and women return home from risking life and limb for God and country and find themselves in need of a doctor, a meal, a place to live or a job, the Republican Congress’ position is that the bank is closed.

Although the Dow has more than doubled during the Obama presidency and the Bush era massive monthly job losses have been reversed, the sluggish economic growth, the failing state of education and the inability to put millions more Americans to work is laid at the door of President Obama’s policies by the GOP, not their unreasonable intransigence.  Their disdain for Obama as President is so ingrained that Republicans in Congress now vote against policies they formerly supported and for policies they have generally opposed.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the GOP assault on Obamacare, nee the Affordable Care Act.  This marketplace idea to cover more Americans and bring down the overall costs of health care was the brainchild of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation.  Individuals in both parties initially lauded the idea.  The Massachusetts legislature adopted the plan and its governor, Mitt Romney, signed it into law.  In a subsequent interview, Romney saw it as a model for the nation.  But as the multitude of Republican presidential candidates debated their positions during the 2008 campaign, Mitt Romney’s signature healthcare achievement received no scorn from his opponents or the conservative media.  However, after Barack Obama signed virtually the same program into law, their own conservative plan became the GOP’s singular, most visible political attack throughout the 2012 national campaigns.  Even candidate Romney vowed to destroy his very own policy lauded as good for Massachusetts just a few short years before.

The passage of the Affordable Care Act and its subsequent authentication by the Supreme Court of the United States, has not deterred the Republicans in Congress from voting to repeal the law more than 4 dozen times.  In a fit of desperation, at the urging of the Tea Party and several of their congressional delegates, the GOP orchestrated a government shutdown in a futile effort to defund the law.  The reported signups for health insurance under the Act have reached 8 million and it is climbing.  The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s recent evaluation expects that the law will save billions more than originally forecasted.  And many Americans who were against Obamacare actually like the law when the provisions of the ACA are explained to them.  Yet under these promising conditions the influence of the Tea Party and their bankrolling apparatus has convinced the GOP to go all in against Obamacare as a mid-term election strategy.  The millions of newly insured, and better insured, Americans and their children, who would suffer in the loss of the ACA, would become collateral damage – casualties of a domestic political war.

The emergence of the Tea Party, as an extension of the Republican Party, has so frightened the GOP that Florida Senator, Marco Rubio voted against his own proposal for immigration reform.  Also unprecedented is the refusal of the Republican Congress to allocate funds to repair a severely crumbling infrastructure that would not only create jobs, but also improve the safety of the American traveller as well as the delivery of interstate commerce.

Recently, President Obama was asked whether he thinks race has affected the course of his presidency.  The right-stream media, almost exclusively without context, began to berate the president over, what was a totally logical response.  In the face of Tea Party rallies displaying racially derogatory images of Obama and speakers at those rallies decrying him as “not one of us,” media and social media conservatives deny that the color of Mr. Obama’s skin has no bearing on their obsessive opposition, even after his election wrought a record number of death threats against him, paranoid pronouncements of a coming race war, and a record number of gun sales.

Even after President Obama has approved two extensions of the Bush era tax cuts, abandoned the Democrat preferred single payer and/or public option healthcare bill in favor of the market-based conservative Affordable Care Act, and, to the consternation of many Democrats, approved a massive troop surge into Afghanistan, conservative media still continues to label him a Marxist and a socialist.

States all over these purple mountains majesty have become tireless in their efforts to destroy the historic Republican support of civil and voting rights.  That those legislative efforts are aimed specifically at non-white Americans after the election and reelection of the first non-white president is not a coincidence.  There are those Democrats, leftists and centrists who believe that this right wing behavior that seems willing to inflict a great deal of collateral damage on the country, is simply because Barack Obama is black.  I disagree.

This unprecedented opposition, irrational intransigence and overt hatred is because the President of the United States is black.  And they are totally willing to punish the whole of the United States, our allies and the world economy to see that this never happens again.      

VON RYAN'S EXCESS

As he approaches completing the sixteenth year of his $175,000/year, part-time position - you can hardly call what Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan does a job - he has glommed on to the audacity of some of his Republican colleagues that describe certain communities in the inner cities as not knowing the culture of work.  If there is one obvious community in America that does not know the culture of real work, it is the Washington, DC community of the 535 persons to which Paul Ryan belongs.

I am sure that many of the people whom Ryan, and his senatorial colleague Rand Paul, choose to denigrate regarding work would be willing to represent their community by putting in more than a full-time work schedule, with a lot less days off than Mr. Ryan receives, for half the salary and less perks and benefits.  Though in fairness to Ryan and his GOP brethren, I am also sure it is extremely painstaking and backbreaking to have to beg people for hundreds and thousands of dollars, on their many days and hours off, just to try and keep their cushy part-time gig.

I see lots of formerly hard working New Yorkers asking for mere fractions of dollars just to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich.  So I can only imagine the grueling toll it takes on Congressman Ryan to sit at home on the weekends, with his feet up, talking on the phone, trying to get other people to raise money for him.  After all, that reported $200,000 he earned in 2011 from his investment in a mineral company, his six figure salary, and his nearly $8,000,000 net worth could disappear in an instant, much like the savings, jobs and pensions of millions of Americans who were bilked by the financial institutions Mr. Ryan sees no need to regulate.  That would surely jeopardize the well-being of his family if he is unable to continue representing his hometown Wisconsin congressional district.

Hiring a staff to listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck so that he knows what to say on the Sunday talk shows must be extremely stressful part-time work.  And being just one of 435 in a country of more than 300 million people can only be a testament to how important Mr. Ryan is.

It requires a very special talent to pay owners to move their companies overseas, impoverish American workers and convince those newly unemployed, bankruptcy seeking, foreclosed on, evicted Americans that it was in their best interests and the best interests of our country, that their hard-working financial contributions to family, community and national wealth were a burden to America's greatness and that some unknown persons, thousands of miles away are more deserving of rifles and tanks, courtesy of the good old US of A, than a laid off worker's child deserves a bowl of soup and a sandwich.  This is why he asks for your support and your vote.

Dissecting the intricacies and benefits of Paul Ryan's budgetary plans are so difficult and complex that those who disagree, especially those in "culturally non-working inner city communities" should not even be allowed to vote.  Also those who should not be allowed to vote are the thousands of Mr. Ryan's Wisconsin neighbors whose fundamental right to bargain for fair wages and benefits have been stripped with the full support of their Janesville representative.

Is it chutzpah or mere hypocrisy that allows Paul Ryan to betray that long held union policy while his own salary, benefits and pension package is, basically dependent on his own hands and those of his other 534 "union" members in Washington, DC who stand to benefit most from it?  Is it chutzpah or hypocrisy that enables Congressman Ryan's disdain for a minimum wage increase for the below poverty working class while championing tax breaks and subsidies for multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies that keep those workers in poverty?  And is it chutzpah or mere hypocrisy that drives Mr. Ryan's concern for the deficit and national debt that, allegedly, has given the working poor too much and the filthy rich too little?

Regardless, Paul Ryan's American dream is secure.  Should he choose to walk out on his lucrative part-time position, or get voted out, there will be plenty of offices on K Street ready to turn his six figure salaried sphere of influence into seven figures wherein he may continue to stifle the millions of American citizens whose American dream is to work a decent job for a fair and decent salary, send their children to college, enjoy the occasional vacation, and play with their grandchildren on birthdays and holidays without fear that their next toothache, headache, chest pain or nasal drip might be severe enough to force their family into a homeless shelter in a culturally jobless community.

CHANNELLING THE THIRD REICH

The Case Against STOP AND FRISK

            We have heard it all before.  “This will handcuff the police… Crime will explode…The public safety will be at risk!”

            These were just a few of the law enforcement pronouncements that emerged more than four decades ago after the Supreme Court of the United States leveled the, now famous, Miranda decision.  It was widely regarded that allowing law enforcement to violate a basic right of persons only suspected of a crime or misdemeanor was the best way for police officers to properly do their job.  Now, more than forty years later, we are faced with the same excuses as police forces are allowed to run roughshod over the Fourth Amendment under the auspices of public safety using the policy called STOP AND FRISK.

            Having executed more than half a million Stop and Frisks annually, the New York Police Department has discovered only a negligible number of guns.  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg contends that even finding one gun, which might save one life, is worth the 600,000 or more invasions into the lives and liberty of, mostly black and Latino men.  If this wholly corrupt policy of Stop and Frisk is supposed to be about guns and gun violence, why are hundreds and thousands of non-gun carrying men of color being subjected to the criminal justice system for drug possession?

            Award winning syndicated radio host and television personality, Don Imus, has raised millions of dollars for charity throughout his career.  His wife is a best-selling author who specializes in diet and environmental issues.  They run a non-profit cattle ranch in New Mexico hosting teenagers afflicted with cancer, sickle cell anemia and those siblings of victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.  In the past, Mr. Imus has related a story wherein a couple of homicide detectives, on a routine canvass, entered his home to question if he had seen anything relating to a recent murder in his neighborhood.  According to Imus, a bunch of cocaine was out in full view at the time.  Imagine the difference in all of the aforementioned lives and their families had those homicide detectives informed the Narcotics Division to get a search warrant for Mr. Imus’ premises.  Now realize all of the damage done, educational and job opportunities lost, and the untold grief experienced by the multitude of individuals and their families, almost exclusively black and Latino, who have been charged with drug possession under the guise of gun violence prevention.

            Police Departments have been using Stop and Frisk to bolster their arrest records and federal funding as part of the decades of failure of the War on Drugs.  A more honest approach would have been for the courts to allow the confiscation of illegal drugs but the release of all suspects who were not in possession of a firearm.  In August of 2012, the NYPD discovered a massive weapons cache at a home in Astoria.  And in December of that same year, another major weapons arsenal was found in Greenwich Village.  Another cache was discovered in Staten Island.  Yet tens of thousands of Stop and Frisks did not, and do not, occur in those neighborhoods.   

            President Obama was targeted and Attorney General Eric Holder was called on the carpet before Congress when it was discovered that, under an ill-advised sting operation dubbed FAST AND FURIOUS, started during the GW Bush administration, weapons were lost and a federal agent was killed.  However, persons of color are dying on the streets of major American cities by the hundreds, from illegal guns, and the US Congress is silent.

            It is well known that many of those guns are purchased out of state and subsequently sold on the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere.  Yet the Congress has had no public hearings and called no ATF agents, supervisors or directors to testify as to their lack of effectiveness into the interstate transportation of guns, nor have they subpoenaed any Governors to testify as to how a gun purchased in their state(s) wound up killing an innocent person a thousand miles away.  The death of one ATF agent as a result of a botched government program and the deaths of four diplomats at the hands of a zealous mob in Benghazi, Libya ignited the 24 hour news media as Congress allegedly vowed to get to the bottom of these tragedies.  However, in neighborhoods of people of color where five deaths might be considered a calm month, the US Congress sees no such national crisis.

            This targeting of minorities, under force of law, is not a new phenomenon.  The inferior status of Jews was established in September 1935 by the Nuremberg Laws.  According to the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HOLOCAUST, these laws “officially revoked the civil equality won by Jews in the period of the Emancipation and gave legal force to racist principles… to separate the Jews as individuals and as a group from the rest of the population.”   The Nazi policies were “calculated to eliminate the Jews from public and social life, take away their civil rights, and crush them economically.”  Edward B. Westermann confirms these policies in HITLER’S POLICE BATTALIONS.  He writes, “The regular police also played an important role in enforcing discriminatory ordinances and statutes… including the enforcement of the provisions of the “Nuremberg Laws” of 1935.”

            The use of Stop and Frisk as a rationale for curbing gun violence should not be heralded as legitimate.  There are several methods of policing that can also be used to stem the waves of gun violence.  The police can use excessive force, coerced confessions, quarter officers in suspected homes, conduct warrantless searches and refuse to honor the Miranda decision.  However, there exists well-documented, historical reasons among the American legal landscape as to why these methods will not be employed.  And they are the very same historical reasons why the policy of Stop and Frisk should be halted.

It has not been outlawed because incarcerating and marginalizing persons of color for dubious reasons is also something we have heard before.  It was infamously noted by Chief Justice Roger Taney in his Dred Scott v. Sanford majority opinion.  Blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

GUNS, IMMIGRATION & THE BENGHAZI BOOGALOO

In his best depiction of faux outrage on a recent MEET THE PRESS, Sen. John McCain asked host David Gregory, “Do you care that four Americans are dead?”  There are so many relevant questions that could have been fired back at McCain’s insistence on keeping the murders in Benghazi on his front burner it is hard to know where to begin. 

But let’s try!  Gregory could have asked the Arizona Senator why he was holding Sen. Hagel, designee for Secretary of Defense, to answer for the State Dept. and the White House national security team. Or he could have asked why a Defense Dept. nominee would  be privy to information of an ongoing investigation not involving the Defense Dept.  Better yet, David Gregory could have asked John McCain if he, Sens. Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz care that almost 2000 Americans have died of gun violence since December right here in the United States.  Are the lost lives of those 2000, also their fellow Americans, any less worthy of the outrage he feigns for the four killed in  Benghazi?

It is difficult to pinpoint which of his losses since the 2000 campaign toward the presidency has transformed John McCain from a respected and honorable statesman into a bitter, intransigent shill for the hard right conservative movement which has cared more about damaging any positive aura, idea or legislative proposal surrounding President Obama than they care about the positive progress of the nation and its citizenry.

Any consumers of the Fox News Channel’s primetime lineup following the Sept. 11^th Benghazi attack would have been hard pressed to know that a presidential election was taking place in less than 60 days as those hosts reverted to an all Benghazi all the time information station.  It left those consumers virtually unaware that Latino-Americans, nationwide, were organizing to re-elect the president.  And, having garnered approximately 72% of the Latino vote, Barack Obama has compelled, even some of the more strident Congressional Republicans, conservative think-tank operators, and neo-conservative radio and television talk show hosts to get serious about a less than harsh avenue of immigration reform for long time undocumented immigrants.

Almost immediately after the Nov. 6^th election, Sen. McCain went on the record for his approval of comprehensive immigration reform because, “We keep losing elections!”  While the GOP’s sudden concern about Latinos in America is touching, it is woefully transparent.  Instead of looking to future elections, why are they not concerned about young Latinos bullied into gangs, the substandard schools they attend, their lack of available work, the level of violence heaped upon them and the discriminately high levels of placement into the criminal justice system that they, and black Americans suffer for offenses that their white fellow citizens, often, walk away from with less than slaps on the wrist.  The plight of full-blooded Americans, complete with birth certificates and citizenship papers, has been ignored simply because of their language, ancestral culture and color of their skin.  Are they not Americans also? 

Why does the multitude of violent deaths among these American citizens not garner a similar level of concern from Sen. McCain?  Are they not our future diplomats, future police officers, future Connecticut schoolteachers and future congresswomen from Arizona?  The debate over common sense gun legislation, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, has once again put the subjects of movies, video games and mental health at issue in an effort to understand Newtown, Aurora, Columbine, etc.  Yet the tone and character of the discussion changes drastically when the deadly events are the Long Island Railroad, DC sniper(s), and a New York Wendy’s Restaurant – carnage all perpetrated by black men.

We are being inundated with thoughts and questions as to why white males, often from two parent and/or well-to-do middle class homes and having quality educations can suddenly go off the deep end.  Yet we engage an entirely different mindset regarding black and Latino men because poverty, poor nutrition, substandard schools and healthcare, and the repeated, court sanctioned, humiliation of their 4^th Amendment rights should have no deleterious effects.

After Barack Obama’s re-election, the GOP, once again finds itself soul-searching on how best to ‘reach out to black and Hispanic voters.’  The murders of Chris Stevens and his colleagues in Benghazi, while devastatingly tragic, could still have occurred in a more secure, better guarded consulate if overrun by an army of armed fanatics.  Sen. McCain and his fellow Republicans can better serve this nation by not scapegoating the Chuck Hagels, the State Dept. and the White House for their own political gain and start making a sincere effort of outreach to the multitudes of people of color in this nation who continue to shun them at the ballot box.  And they can do so by starting to have a frank and honest discussion about keeping them alive. 

 

True or Fal$e

"The President got his tax increase!"  That is the Congressional GOP position as to why they will not compromise on additional revenue(s) by closing tax loopholes.  That position is false. 

During the fiscal cliff negotiations, the Republicans offered to close tax loopholes as their solution to raising revenue rather than the president's plan of raising tax rates.  However, they offered no loopholes that they were willing to close.  Having agreed to raise tax rates on the top earners to avoid the fiscal cliff, an intransigent GOP is unwilling to look at raising additional revenues because "The President got his tax increase!"  He did not!

President Obama's plan, and the plan voted for by the majority of the American people, was to raise the income tax rate on earnings over $250,000.  The president compromised and agreed to increase the earnings rate to over $450,000 before the new rate kicks in.  So the claim that the president got his tax increase is patently false.  Obama's tax increase falls short by $200,000 of earnings for each high earning taxpayer.

Therefore, it is only fair and balanced that the GOP compromise and agrees to close tax loopholes which they claimed they were willing to close during the fiscal cliff negotiations.  And it is incumbent upon President Obama, his party, and his supporters to insist that no further cuts will be on the table until the Congressional GOP meets the president halfway on the issue of revenue(s) by agreeing to close many of the absurd tax loopholes that benefit only those in the top 2% who receive them to the detriment of the rest of the country.

IT'S REVOLTING

“Shocked and Awed” is probably the best way to describe the reaction of the Republican establishment to the overwhelmingly, stunning victory of Barack Obama in his bid to retain the Presidency of the United States.  As the GOP and the right-stream media scramble to figure out how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in several US Senate races, along with the biggest American political prize, they remain stunned that the George W. Bush economic message, delivered by a wealthy businessman, failed to resonate with the American electorate.  Their failure to grasp control of the US Senate is certain to amend the GOP platform to preclude all future male candidates from ever mentioning the word “rape” on the campaign trail.

The demagoguery that was displayed throughout the 2010 mid-term elections that ignored a list of very impressive accomplishments during the first two years of the Obama administration, which diverted another great depression, failed to exact revenge against the President in 2012.  When the Tea Party and the extremists in the right-stream media hijacked cooler heads in the Republican Congress, things began to go south.  Common ground, cooperation and bi-partisanship became four-letter words in the GOP vocabulary.  The term “moderate” became synonymous with “terrorist collaborator.”  And Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, brazenly avowed that the number one priority of the Republican Party would be to deny Barack Obama a second term.

After a record number of Senate filibusters and, the epitome of government waste, 33 House votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the voting public was no longer buying  the Republican Party’s brand of tea.  Thus, on November 6, 2012, the Tea Party's platform and influence found its way to the bottom of Boston Harbor along with the presidential aspirations of Boston Harbor’s former governor.

The chameleon that was candidate Mitt Romney alternated his candidacy between his paid political campaign brain-trust and an extremist media whose hatred of President Obama has been on display since he dared to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2008.  There was no better evidence of this than the initial Romney response after Mother Jones released the, now infamous, 47% video.  The almost maniacal Obama haters such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity went on the air almost immediately and virtually demanded that Romney endorse every word spoken at that 47% fundraiser.  In addition to following Limbaugh’s severely flawed advice, Romney had his Vice Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, echo that absurdly insensitive sentiment even after Ryan had been zealously campaigning to woo many of those 47% dependent on Medicare and Social Security.  Eluding those two, amid this tactic, is that they had classified Paul Ryan’s own mother, who campaigned with her son the candidate, as a freeloading taker.

In a matter of days, having realized that doubling down on their dismissal of 47% of America had been an unmitigated political disaster, Gov. Romney and Congressman Ryan  experienced a compassionate, conservative, religious epiphany.  Suddenly, the public learned that they were really concerned about helping 100% of the American people.  This was a clear indication that the GOP, after suffering major defeats in several burgeoning demographics, has to begin to expand their brand beyond the thoughts harbored by Fox News personalities and conservative radio’s myopic national and world view. 

The naiveté of Karl Rove, Dick Morris, and many Romney supporters and the hired brain-trust who have hitched their thought processes, political predictions and predilections to the sole sources of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and much of the right-stream media have awakened to a national phenomenon that most reasonable persons and pundits have seen coming for the last generation.  George W. Bush gathered 40% of the Latino vote and Ronald Reagan received a higher percentage of black votes than any of the most recent GOP presidential candidates.  The GOP's attempts at outreach is failing. 

 Lost among the conservative praise of the hero Ronald Reagan, is the fact that he and George Herbert Walker Bush operated in a dying Cold War world - and that they both raised taxes.  Also lost in the racially coded meandering rhetoric of anti-Obama Romney surrogates such as John Sununu and the egomaniacal Donald Trump, who avers that the 2012 election was a sham and that there needs to be a revolution, is that we are in the midst of a revolution.  The revolution is being televised.  And it is being waged by the 99%.

 

              

RISKY BUSINESS

          GOP presidential candidate, Mitt Romney proudly proclaimed that he liked to fire people who did not deliver services.  That does not explain how so many people, who did deliver products and services for decades, were fired when their companies were placed under the umbrella of Bain Capital.  However, it does explain Gov. Romney’s unreasonable lack of transparency in his plans to repair the economic woes of the country.  After bludgeoning many successful American companies, including KB Toys, the second largest toy company in the nation, and raising the poverty and misery index of thousands of employees and their families with his slash and burn business model as CEO of Bain Capital, Romney believes that the American people are supposed to trust his judgment and capacity for business success based on the size of his bank account(s).  And that is why the GOP contenders for the 2012 presidency should never have shown such cowardice when they vehemently, and correctly, raised the issue of “vulture capitalism.”

Because of the excessive noise of the “right-stream” media and the overbearing influence of the GOP’s “Tea-nut Gallery,” many of the Republican presidential hopefuls folded their tents and failed to pursue what is, perhaps, one of the seminal issues that a Mitt Romney campaign for president should be compelled to answer.  Contrary to the private equity, and Bain Capital defenders, the importance of debating Gov. Romney’s tenure at Bain, and his lack of transparency in all things financial can be summed up in two words – Bernie Madoff.   The absurdity of the Romney pledge to roll back needed financial regulations can also be summed up in two words – housing crisis.  Therein lies the folly in believing a person’s wealth qualifies them for executive political office.

Though Mitt Romney and Bernie Madoff made their fortunes worlds apart from the letter of the law, a close examination of the factual aftermath might easily consider them to be kindred spirits.  When all was said and done, their “clientele” was left financially ravaged.  In Mr. Madoff’s case, many of his investors were well-heeled persons looking to subsidize a comfortable lifestyle.  In Mitt Romney’s case, small, medium and large sized successful businesses incurred unsustainable financial burdens under the auspices of Bain Capital.  Romney’s business practices then left thousands unemployed, bankrupted families, devastated entire communities and basically wire-transferred our physical and financial wealth to foreign banks and countries.  It was political malfeasance for the GOP candidates to drop this issue, under the guise of free-market capitalism, when it is this kind of market policy that contributes to the slow growth and stagnant unemployment numbers that they were making the centerpiece of their campaigns against President Obama.  It was not only short-sighted and ignorant, but it was patently dishonest to malign how other countries are surpassing the American economic and educational engine while many of those “free-market” politicos advance outsourcing, free trade, and foreign investment but eschew investment in our own American education, infrastructure and industrious spirit.

The GOP celebration of wealth without the scrutiny of how it was obtained results in making millionaires at the cost of millions of homes placed underwater and/or in foreclosure.  It results in banks taking on insecure properties and riddles the nation with debt. 
 

By allowing the Tea-nut Gallery and their right-stream media advocates to dictate the entire direction of the Republican Party, the GOP has abandoned any and all sense of compromise toward a better America.  They continue to advance the great lie, without specificity, that after losing 750,000 jobs per month at the close of George W. Bush’s second term, that President Obama has made things worse.  And, for the first time in recent memory, they have refused to support putting people to work to repair our crumbling infrastructure.     

There is a rank hypocrisy among conservative noisemakers in refusing to allow into question, the path to Mitt Romney’s fortune, his arrogant ability to toss around $10,000 bets, and his pathological need for financial secrecy when they were boisterously apoplectic about the tax returns of Timothy Giethner, Tom Daschle, and others at the beginning of the Obama administration.

This negligence toward the best interests of the United States is unprecedented.  And it is ironic that President Obama often thinks of, and quotes, Abraham Lincoln as he faces the kind of vitriol that the sixteenth president must have faced in his effort to keep the Union together.  Hopefully, brother will not begin to fire upon brother in a long and protracted Civil War.  However, as soon as Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, they certainly purchased enough weapons to do so.

September 13, 2012