The Republican Party is America’s Cancer
EXCELLENT blog. Tue. March 27 by MCH
...........But cancer is the perfect metaphor for the modern Republican party. In the past 30 years, the GOP has managed to infect just enough Americans to keep our country in a vicious circle of treatment, remission, and full-blown attacks, ultimately leaving a body politic and nation in a nearly perpetual state of serious illness.
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............. There is a purpose to such hair-brained economic policy, and it was voiced succinctly by one of the most powerful non-elected figures in the Republican Party: Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform who has connived every elected Republican politician in today’s Congress to sign his “no new taxes” pledge, once said he would like to shrink government “down to the size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.” Consider that metaphor. Norquist’s ultimate goal is to kill the federal government—the organizing government that the founders outlined in the Constitution. Of course, there are places in the world that would seem a perfect fit for a guy like Grover and most of his GOP comrades—it’s called Somalia. If the GOP is America’s cancer, Grover Norquist has been one of the busiest mutant cancer cells.
But this is what the modern GOP has been trying to do since the 1980s: explode the deficit and national debt to such immense proportions that we as a country cannot afford to pay for the programs that help American citizens. And then blame the bad economic policy on the Democrats. Medicare, Social Security, FEMA, the EPA, food stamps, any and all regulatory policies—these are all federal programs that our citizenry has voted for and supported and PAID FOR over the past 75 years. The vast majority of Americans agree that these are all valuable and worthwhile programs, and we remain perfectly willing to pay taxes in order to keep these programs viable. But not the GOP. They’re infected, corrosive, and they would prefer to get rid of these programs. Again: Republicans are a cancer to America.
So in 2008 our economy collapsed and the Republican Party has not done one concrete thing to help you or me or the rest of the country in its efforts to recover. They opposed the 2009 Stimulus package, the federal loan to automakers to keep the industry alive, the Affordable Care Act, closing loopholes for U.S. companies who move their businesses overseas, student financial aid expansion, Wall Street reform, the credit cardholders’ bill of rights, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (assuring equal pay for equal work for women), FHA reform, expanded benefits for Veterans, repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Disclose Act (making political money contributions transparent) . . . the list goes on and on. Since our economy collapsed in 2008, the GOP has only been interested in legislation that cuts taxes, keeps regulation off the very industries that tanked our economy, maintains funding for war and production of war machinery, and drilling for more oil. Most recently, the GOP has taken great interest in limiting women’s rights to health care services and promoting laws that involve inserting items into pregnant women’s vaginas because women certainly don’t know what’s best for them.
The good news is that all three of those treatments are available every two, four, and six years at the ballot box. Hopefully this year will be a step toward treatment. Granted, there are places in this country where the body politic is so riddled with this Republican cancer that its citizens are beyond cure (see Mississippi, Alabama, etc.) But for the rest of the fully upright country, treatment is urgent and necessary if we want any chance of beating the Big C. We’ve struggled to survive 30 years of the Republican Party’s abnormal dividing cells, and it has been metastasizing aggressively the past few years. We don’t have too many years left before the prognosis is terminal.
http://roadkillmch.blogspot.com/2012/03/politics-republican-party-is-americas.html?showComment=1332955248023#c4267272019064456471
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