Tag Archives: current events

The Orange Man announces another fatuous documentation–in a long line of such productions–of things the Republican Party will never, ever, manage to do. I’m not sure it would be politically wise for them to execute any of their plans. For decades, they’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of not walking their talk, yet, at the same time attaching themselves as benefactors in the wake of the disgruntlement which comes from their constituencies not ever having their dreams come true.

I might except from this collection the Republican’s core constituency: the so-called country club, chamber of commerce, club for growth, Republicans. The GOP has worked trickle down economics so as to realize its actual goal: to grab the middle class by the ankles, invert each member, and vigorously shake so the smolians come trickling out. Still, even though the concentration of wealth has accelerated viciously over 30 years, I can’t call the GOP maestros of plutonomy in the aftermath of their latest experiment. After all, the GOP helped wipe out several trillion dollars of wealth, including a big chunk of ‘plutonomical’ wealth, over the last three years.

Anyway, their magic wand, if they had one, would presumably be waved to accomplish longstanding objectives. First, end by privatizing all elements of what the Tea Party brethren call the nanny state: social security, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, the new health care laws, TARP, Fannie and Freddie, EPA, and, so much more! I’m not sure if this is to include farm and trade subsidies, and the SBA, but both are elements of the nanny state. To this prescription, (named years ago, ‘drowning the government in a bath tub,’) other stuff needs to be quickly terminated. All the regulatory bureaucracies get bounced out of C town. I’m not sure what the Tea Party GOP’s attitude is toward subsidies for scientific research, but let’s face it, they’re sucking at the Federal teat too. And, they’re probably atheists!

Then there is the matter of what counts for fairness in the tax code. There’s a mountain of subsidies built into the current code. Why not end each and every one? And then, implement a one size fits all consumption tax which would finally enshrine the principle: no penalty, (thus no demerit,) for achievement.

So much purported ill is cured in all this, I indulge myself by turning to fix what’s wrong with the two year old attitude toward the Constitution. Why not elevate nullification via the enumerated powers and provide a good state’s rights sanction against any eruptions of innovation? Other fixes would probably have to be deferred because you’d need a Constitutional convention to purge the fine old founding document of its mistakes, and this would have to happen before the economic treatment. But, the economic treatment carries with it an adjustment period and you can’t be sure the mood of the sovereign citizens would be receptive during this period of adjustment. I guess the restoration will have to wait.

Social issues aren’t the toughest to solve. Abortion, of course, is ended as soon as possible. And the queer menace will have to be vanquished on a state-by-state basis. Masturbation, I’m not so sure about it. (Personally, I’m sure about it, but, whatever.) Evolution? Heck, its for suckers anyway. As for immigration, you just toss ’em all out on their keister. Enforce the law–that’s what laws are for. As Eric Cantor said about the first amendment, ‘Come on!.” There’s not much one can do about the pesky amendment itself. Still, it’s time to re-enshrine the Judeo-Christian values the various deist and Unitarian founders intended to be absolutely front-and-center in the entire democratic experiment.

Foreign policy is simple. The GOP just has to find its inner Curt LeMay. Turn Iran into a glass parking lot. Go after Islam in-country using RICO. Build the star wars stations wherever necessary. And, by all means, send the UN to Denmark where it belongs.

Once all of this has been realized, a good tag line will be needed for the history books. I think its main bent has to amplify how it came about that main street triumphed over the pointy headed secular humanist ivy league jazz-loving social engineering tax-and-spend atheistic tree-hugging hollywood beholden Darwin worshipping green community organizing sodomy loving marxist coloured Volvo ensconced elites.

I’m working on it.

My main point is if you ask the Grand Old White Tea Party’s best and brightest what’s required, there can’t be any doubt about how overmatched those progressive elites in fact are; and, let’s face it, for their to be an American exceptionalism, there has to be exceptional Americans.

The choice is obvious.

A few notes.

The Pledge for America states the following:

An arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites makes decisions, issues mandates, and enacts laws without accepting or requesting the input of the many.

Over the 42 years since Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, the Republican have controlled to White House for 28 years. For 10 years the GOP controlled the Senate, and for 6 years they controlled the House. Veto pens were kept sharp. Assuming there’s no wish to have it both ways, the record of Republican accomplishment over this time period was not a glittering showcase for requesting and accepting the input of the many. Nor was it a showcase for something other than self-appointed Republican elites doing their thing while being advantaged by having at least some of the reigns of power.

What is happening in our current political era is a spectacle. I have schematized it accordingly.

Although the Bush II reign provided ripe opportunities, overall the ruling ideology for three decades, Reaganism, has produced Conservatism-light. (This is bad enough, as the economic metric demonstrate.) But, now we have the inchoate anarcho-communitarian Tea Party vigorously pursuing an incoherent but powerful version of Conservatism-heavy duty. The Republican elite have been taking a beating–even as they have been working hard to ‘quadrangulate,’ and, in doing so, co-opt the vigor of the Tea Party brethren.

The optimal goal for the self-absorbed insider GOP elites would be to join together the Tea Party with the old line Club for Growth/Christian Conservative factions.

You can see well enough where the fault lines are. For example, you have the libertarian, individualist faction up against the traditionalist God-fearing faction. One is against social engineering, and the other would welcome some focused, engineered, moral compliance. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is suspicious of “top down,” while in their different ways, the other other three factions are all about top down. The country club elites believe a little decadence constitutes earned rewards, while the Christian conservatives decry extra-familial eroticism–even if they sneak out to the clubs or corner now and then. The Tea Party folk want the government to take its hands off their medicare, while the country clubbers would like to shift medical risk entirely onto those same Tea Party folk.

To reduce this all, how do you square individualism, personal responsibility, cheap labor, risk shifting, moral rectitude, unfettered capitalism, with, on the part of the insider GOP elite, their absorbing desire to be restored to the top of the political food chain? Read the pledge and see how this all gets tangled up.

(I continue to find it astonishing that any citizen of our fair country can claim in the same breath that he or she understands what the founders knew for certain was the point of America, and, that all of sudden our country is in a pitched ‘Manichaean’ battle between good patriots and evil leftists.)

Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Frank Rich, NYT, April 4, 2010, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Obama!)

It would seem quite possible, if not likely, that if you scratch beneath the surface of the numerous anti-Obama factions you would, if determined, scratch into varieties of the real itch.

Even to scratch around in the web sites of the Tea Party territories is to learn sooner or later that one of the itchy spots is sparked by a lot of resentment. No–more than merely ‘a lot.’ This is viewable once one tugs away the various remixing of atrocious interpretations of history, the Constitution, and the religiosity of the sainted founders. It’s almost as if somebody wanted to build a paragon out of racist slaveholders.