http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20403Hey, Republicans - Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way
by Jaime O'Neill | February 21, 2009
Now that they no longer hold the purse strings, the Republican Party has decided that its only role is to obstruct all attempts to heal the illness they visited upon the nation, the huge financial mess that occurred due to their profligate spending, the lax oversight of the financial markets, and the deeply embedded corruption they nourished under the guise of deregulation. Having brought the nation (and the state) to the brink of ruin, having run up the national debt to astronomical levels, and having cut taxes on the wealthiest people in the country while running a couple of expensive wars, the Republicans have suddenly become fiscal conservatives again. They've re-adopted the Nancy Reagan mantra of "just say no" when it comes to any government spending not designed to enrich Halliburton or other friends of the Bush/Cheney consortium.
The GOP is acting like children while the rest of us are poised on the edge of a precipice. At the state level, they've been holding their breath until they turn blue, unwilling to compromise on taxes or spending, whacking away at benefits to the poorest, the least powerful, and most vulnerable among us, scraping away pennies from the disabled, robbing from the welfare of children, all while continuing to stamp their feet and insist on more tax cuts for the wealthy, and tying up the state's finances for months after an annual operating budget was due. They have been petulant beyond belief, not in the interest of addressing the serious financial problems California faces, but in hot pursuit of the partisan ideology they cling to -- the now discredited idea that government is a bad thing, that it should be starved, and that taxes are, ipso facto, bad for business, bad for the economy, and bad for building moral character if some of that tax money manages to find its way into the pockets of the poor.
snip//
But Republicans would rather pout than help out, would rather hope for failure, along with their most visible spokesperson, Rush Limbaugh. They would rather see the country go down the tubes under Democratic leadership than attempt to help avert such an outcome. They'd rather rewrite history and blame FDR for the Great Depression than make themselves useful.
So, the GOP now stands for little more than the Gratuitously Obstructionist Party, a group of people whose only solution to anything at all is to lower taxes for people who are already rolling in the wealth and the favors granted to them under eight years of Bush benevolence for the people he met in those elitist Eastern prep schools he attended, and his dorm mates at Yale and Harvard where he hung out with the pampered sons of the nation's biggest crooks and money-manipulators.
With the nation's economy in flames, the Republicans who set the fire stand with empty hoses in their hands, unwilling to help turn on the water to put it out. Shame on 'em.
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