When it comes down to the nitty gritty, we as attention-paying citizens or don’t-give-a-damn citizens need to come out of the closet. We need to admit who or what we stand for and declare what philosophy and policies best reflect our concerns.
If we are most focused on American Idol, Nascar, the chosen pro sports team and crime shows, let’s just stay where we are, with asses super-glued to the couch. But if we are paying even slight attention to what is going on, listening even with half an ear to campaign slogans, television sound bytes and what passes for popular journalism in this country, let’s make a real appraisal of who stands for what?
I focus with Republicans because in this state they are the big boys on the block. Appraising most Democratic policies really means labeling Dem priorities as corporate Republican values moderated in a more liberal direction.
However in our state we have Republicans slip sliding toward a loss of family values credibility as they focus on driving this machine with one hand on the steering wheel and the other listening to party marching orders. This past week all our Republicans voted against the insulin bill in which a reasonable monthly cost for important and life-saving medication was not worth stepping out of the partisan march.
Why? Looks to me like the Republicans only have one single song to sing.
The only “good” for the Republican Party absolutely must be the only “good” for the rest of us.
America is at War with itself.
American lives need to be lived in a wartime environment.
American citizens need to practice a total deferral to the self-defined patriotism of the elect.
Risch, Crapo and company continue to insist that American citizens absolutely must trust their future to those few at the top of the power pole who want to personally stay in their public civic high castles they vote their party prejudices rather than what the citizens need or want.
Right.
Those Idaho Congressional Republicans who have to run for re-election this year are in truth insisting their corporatist view of what’s best for working families and the poorest among us, here is the national and state Republican Platform in a large nutshell:
(1)
We must stay the course while remaining strictly committed to tax cut priorities which did not help the former president from his impact of setting in motion our national economic failure. We must accept the lie that what has happened is totally the fault of the Dems.
If we want to vote Republican we are then left to hope for the best but continue to expect the worst and recognize that the burden of middle class taxes are going to continue paying for our recovery efforts that poor unnecessary cash into Corporate Welfare Capitalism.
(2)
We will stay the course in a pay-off-the-national-debt circumstance created by Republican values that will be an ongoing burden on our grandchildren. Trillions of dollars of debt generated under the influence of lobby dollars and an obstructionist party that has always labeled Democrats as “taxers and spenders” is not the legacy the party of Crapo, Risch, Fulcher and Simpson will be remembered by. In truth future citizens are likely to look upon the Republicans as the “tax-cutters and spenders” party.
(3)
We will continue to stay the course while baiting us with the phrase “ownership society.” Ownership society to Republicans is in reality merely another means of generating – you guessed it – more profits for business.
“Owning” health care, retirement, education and homes only happens when you “buy” something from chosen lobbied corporate interests (see Medicare D plan), “invest” in something to own or by patriotically consuming what the Jones are already consuming so as to keep up civic duty.
(4)
We will continue to stay the course while an ungodly number of us go without access to adequate health care. That’s one thing tens of millions of Americans could use ownership of.
Of course the rest of we middle-classers do “own” always-increasing health care premiums. Somehow I fail to see how this helps the troops, keeps terrorists at bay, or will make it easier when we have to cope more aggressively with thugs like Putin in order to secure whatever non-attention-paying Americans (apparently the largest voting bloc in the state and nation) will buy into as a security blanket worth supporting.
(5)
We will continue to stay the course while the Republicans – under the guise of “ownership society”- preside over corporate reductions and/or eliminations of pension funds. Why is it that we must be patriotic and tolerate a “conservative tax-cut and spend” partisan party under this circumstance?
(6)
We will continue to stay the course while Republicans pretend that the extreme Christian Right represents the majority of American Christian voters. The Republicans need Jesus and his Armageddon Asteroid of the End the Times. Leaving (all of us more liberal-minded citizens) Behind thus works for a party hunger to climb back into the driver’s seat. Your Republican Party thinks more of these folks than the attention-paying voters who live and work all around us.
(7)
Republicans will forever deny any criminality on the part of their pseudo-religious political shill who did their bidding when they thought they would have the majority votes forever.
These things are what the Republicans did not and will not tell you. They want to continue to stay the course and do it in terms of maintaining their own discredited and – when it comes to corporate welfare – dishonest domestic economic theories. It does not matter what you and I think so long as they are in power.
Only you and I can take this out of their hands.
They will not change things unless we intervene.
So all you self-styled economic sophisticates who have bought into Republican Konservative Kapitalism worship keep your heads in the sand. If you cannot see just how many corporations in this country are only showing profits primarily through government intervention, bail-outs and contracts – you go ahead. Reveal to the rest of us just how poorly you understand the less-government-more-free-enterprise ticket.
As we attempt to impose a fake American dominance on the world based on our national credit rating and economic extortion backed by big-stick-waving, go ahead and look the other way while your narrow morality authorizes a trashing of the American Dream.
Those of you who have been politically born again into the cult of a Republican Jesus, can keep insisting that Jesus would have voted for Failed President Trump, would have made propaganda appearances on Fox News and Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club.
Republican Jesus would go along with the deaths of civilian men, women and children in The Ukraine or anywhere else as “acceptable collateral damage.”
If you think a former president and his railroaded political automatons hold the key to wise governance, you still haven’t done your homework. The holes in your common sense and civic wisdom remain vast and empty.