Maybe we have it all wrong about the Republicans

All this time we've been thinking we're watching losers and their party being destroyed. Yet they've always said they wanted to reduce government. Ronald Reagan said government is the problem. On the Thom Hartman show yesterday a caller and Thom talked about a 'conspiracy theory' they themselves believe in about the Republicans nominating McCain as their candidate in order to lose. That they added Palin onto the ticket to make sure they lost. They spent a fraction of what Obama did and that's from the party that raises more money.

This was so they weren't stuck with the problem they had created. The very thing we're going through now. The economic disaster of the financial meltdown that started a few months before the election. But the thing I'm thinking about is that they've wanted to destroy the social programs that FDR and the Democrats have put in place over the years.

So when Obama throws out money to create jobs some Republican governors try to refuse it. Why? We're thinking it's because they're stupid or just trying to be obstructive and be the party of no, but maybe they're refusing because they want to see the country fail in anything that could help the population. They've already told us they don't believe in government that actually governs for the benefit of its citizens. They believe in the huge gap between the haves and the have nots. Like The Family on C Street they want God's favored to rule over those that God obviously doesn't give a shit about. If you aren't rich or successful (by their standards) then obviously God isn't interested in you. So it's really about finishing God's work of stripping the have nots of even more.

The fact is that what's happening in California (for example) is probably making the Republicans quite happy. The social programs they hate so much are being slashed and cut and even eliminated altogether and they only have to refuse to cooperate now. It's exactly what they've said they want. They don't have to actively find a way of destroying each social program at a time, the way Bush was doing. I'm not surprised they show absolutely no remorse because they have none because their wildest dreams are coming to pass. Social programs are failing all over the country. People are being set free to be homeless and jobless. All they have to do is pretend to care. Meantime they are the rich and the haves and have mores at the expense of the rest of us, and to top it off, they are becoming more wealthy through government. They're the recipients of the benefits of Bush's tax cuts and the corporations are the recipients of government bailouts and they're growing fatter and richer while the rest of us are falling without a safety net.

Watch what is happening in California. The Republican governor categorically refuses to raise taxes because he and the haves and the corporations benefit while he cuts and slashes all the social programs to the most needy. Anyone with half a brain can see that the consequences are going to be disastrous for those involved. That doing what he's doing is going to wreak havoc for many years to come. Maybe forever. The fact is, when the programs that help society are cut chances are they'll never recover. In other words, it's like shrinking them until they can be drowned in a bathtub. This is exactly what the Republicans have been working for since Ronald Reagan became President and they've wanted this since FDR was President. Only this time it's happening under a Democratic President and they won't be getting the blame. Their wildest dreams are happening. No wonder they don't look a bit unhappy. No wonder Rush is working so hard get the Republican base pissed off. He knows that pissing them off just adds to the demise of any semblance of financial or social equality for all Americans. That's anathema to the Republicans.

I'll listen to Thom on iTunes.

Are we screwn?

Just look around.

Isn't this was Obama's campaign was about?!? If we have the power, it's time to force people to change.

It was yesterday, Friday, which is the day Thom Hartman let's the callers talk about anything they want to discuss.

nothing to lose in demanding what you want. Or do they think that the public will stay placated? AND Pres. Obama is more likely to send in govt money to help restore programs than not.

Chances are if it does happen it will be in easily controlled pockets across the country. First, it'll happen under Obama's administration so the people will be pissed off at the Democrats and the Republicans can sit back and enjoy the show. Second, the National Guards in the States will be called out to keep the uprising contained. Third, the majority of the population are getting older and unable and unwilling to take up arms. Violent revolutions are carried out by the young people. Look at Iran's uprising. They're almost all virtually in their 20s and 30s.

The rich? They'll hire Blackwater (Xe) security for themselves and their businesses, and those guys won't shy away from using gunfire freely. Who will stop them?

What will an uprising do except destroy the country even more. It's what the Republicans want.

The way the Repubs have become experts at framing things, the people won't rise up... or change their voting patterns. The Repub use of the Big Lie and propaganda would have made Goebbels proud.

And if the people should somehow wade thru the bullshit and rise up.... well, what you said sounds like a plausible scenario.

When you're busy surviving because you've lost your job and home where are you going to go to uprise in numbers that could mean anything or could stand up to the police, much less the National Guard or tanks?

Of course, they want to throw people out of work, buy their foreclosed houses for dimes on their dollars, hire them back for dimes on the dollars and sell their houses back to them at unregulated rates.

+1

... and many liberals are just too happy to comply you know we are fucked.

Don

the social programs are the first to be cut? I think if I were running things - the programs that I would cut would be the ones that the 'haves' rely on. If you cut those programs - I would think that the public outcry from the 'haves' would be such that the government would have to do something to correct the situation because the pressure the 'haves' would impose on them would be great.

When the Feds or a State government cut the social programs that the 'have nots' rely on - they don't have the power to mount enough pressure to prevent - so they have to go along with it. That's why those are the first to go. I do understand that. But if we are a Christian nation - then its time we start turning the tables and doing things in a Christian manner.

It's not a religious issue at all. It's simply a humane and humanitarian issue. Christianity and especially the Catholic church teach that suffering is good so religion doesn't help. It actually encourages sacrifice and acts of renunciation and it teaches that wanting wealth is a covetous sin.

As a matter of fact I loathe religion. It's not OK for anyone to get rich at the expense of others. The Christ based religions do just that. The Vatican is one of the richest institutions on earth. And the loudest Christian evangelicals are also among the richest in the country.

When the not so rich have nothing then the rich will have much less. If one follows this logic through to its logical conclusion it becomes absurd.

The rich do just fine no matter how poor the poor get. As a matter of fact they get the poor to be their servants and slave wage laborers while they are very rich and very happy. The logic is sound.

That's why there must be forced taxation on the wealthy.

They want government to fail- precisely in the same sense that Limbaugh, et. al want Obama to fail. There's absolutely NO benefit to them if Obama and/or *government* succeeds at ANYTHING (well, other than giving out money to the "HAVES" anyway). We might look at how Republicans/Conservatives run government when they are in office and think of them as incompetent but I don't think that their (mis-)management of government is actually incompetence but rather willful destruction of government and its credibility in the eyes of the public. I hereby direct you to Thomas Frank's illustrative tome, "The Wrecking Crew". Check it out. Truly disconcerting.

are because they're stupid. It's not the case at all. Once we realize their acts are about a deliberate agenda they've had for generations the truth becomes self evident.

The Republicans don't care if they look like they're falling apart. Or even that they are falling apart for real. The Family on C Street remains and will persist.

Maybe not so much. The only things that matter is that they be able to stay in power so that they can continue setting the charges/explosives and detonating them right before it looks like the Democrats get back in power. Then they are on the sidelines trying to get back into power by issuing dire and scary warnings against the Democrats' plans to use government to help fix their mess and.....gasp.....help people. We need to make sure that they don't succeed at it this time (or ever again). There was a reason that our founders established government and didn't give the country over to corporations and/or allow the former colonies to become separate countries or simply let us fall into a perpetual state of anarchy.

He is the über-terrorist. Book 'em, Danno.

Truly an ugly and despicable man.

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It'll be short

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book

"At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets...

...the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay...

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas though our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998."


This is simply a domestic application of what has been done worldwide for decades.

We waste so much time being outraged or thinking that somehow if people like the Blue Dog Democrats or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid would just 'get it' they would stop being obstructionists. They do 'get it'. We're the ones who 'don't get it'. We, the citizens.

"Corporations hiring departed congressional staffers as lobbyists is a ho-hum practice on K Street. But the stakes are particularly high when these Capitol Hill vets are sicced on programs and legislation that are crucial to the country's financial recovery and that involve massive amounts of government spending. In the past year, top bailout recipients, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to JPMorgan Chase, have dispatched more than 100 past congressional staffers and ex-government officials to shape the bailouts to their liking. This crew of well-connected lobbyists includes ex-employees of the congressional committees on banking, finance, and commerce; one-time aides to Democratic and Republican leaders; former Treasury officials; and a past aide to Rahm Emanuel, now the White House chief of staff...”

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine


“…Ms. Klein pins the blame for much of the misery in the world squarely on what she views as Friedman’s misguided philosophy and the many people in its thrall. And here she includes not only a litany of expected conservatives like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and George W. Bush, but what others might think of as conventional liberals, people like Bill Clinton and Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who advocated economic “shock therapy” in post-socialist countries like Bolivia and Poland and now is one of the leading proponents in the effort to increase sharply aid to the world’s poor.

“Since the fall of Communism, free markets and free people have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity’s best and only defense against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers,” Ms. Klein writes. “Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.”

Moreover, it is no secret that capitalism does not require a democratic political system to thrive: China is proof of that. Ms. Klein is not alone, either, in pointing out that many governments serve to protect the interests of the rich, and that as inequality grows, the threat rises that the establishment will turn to undemocratic means to thwart the will of the majority…”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/books/29redb.html

It's been going on for so long that it's considered normal and even good.

By 1937, they were down to 16 members in the U.S. Senate.

The foundation of the Republican party is the destruction of the New Deal programs. They've been quite successful under Bush. Now they may get what they want under a Democratic President because the landslide started at the end of Bush's term.

Like I said above, look at what's happening in California right now. Once the welfare programs to help children are cut what happens. In itself it generates a domino effect for those children and their lives.