No More Sequels!
“You F*cked Up! You Trusted Us!”
I just heard Congressman Rob Portman (R-Ohio) on Meet the Press explain how John McCain will address what the Republicans now label an urgent need for fiscal discipline. Among the tools he’ll use are, of course, the always handy tax cuts for the wealthy. On the spending side a President McCain will use “a scalpel,”and “a hatchet,” to “eliminate programs.” So, here we go again. It’s the usual GOP script after they’ve been in charge for a while. Let’s not forget, they’ve caused a disaster in governance while blaming the other party, but they never fail to then advise the usual “remedies,” i.e. the one’s that got us into this fix in the first place: tax cuts for the wealthy and draconian across the board spending cuts for everyone else. Oh yeah, and how about more privatizing, like McCain’s ideas for health care, and then let’s tax those health benefits too! All this from the folks who consciously engineered the massively horrific, expensive, and unjustified war in Iraq, and pushed supply side domestic policies that “trickled up” to the wealthy, bled the middle class, and further impoverished the poor.
From one of the chief enablers of the Bush years, Congressman Portman’s advice of more of the same would — in the blessedly now unlikely election of John McCain — yield again a result a lot like what we’ve lived through in the Dubya years. They want us to trust them again, and just after they wrecked everything in sight. I sometimes think that they must get together and laugh out loud about it and, like the scene above from the classic 1978 film Animal House, clap us heartily on the back and say, “You f*cked up! You trusted us!”
Toga! Toga! Toga!”
Fast forward thirty years to the national sequel, Animal House 2001-2008. Notice the Animal H
ouse storyline: laissez faire everything and a capacity for wild misrule worthy of Delta house. Where’s Dean Wormer now? Like Delta house, Dubya era GOP rule has gloried in all the “feasances”: mal, mis, and non, though not at all as endearingly. Unfortunately, not many have highlighted enough that this insane governmental riot is not a mere coincidence of Republican rule, it’s actually the underlying strategic purpose of their rule, although even GOP true believers cannot help but be shocked at what Dubya’s inept tactics have wrought. They’re secretly – but sometimes openly – proud of their failing grades. Typical Republican misgovernment since Reagan has resulted in increased spending while simultaneously lowering taxes, and then, as a kind of cover up, using debt financing instead of tax receipts. All of that has yielded enormous deficits and $11 trillion of national debt. Remember when Republicans railed against deficit spending? Just where has “double secret probation” been these last eight years when we needed it?
Roll the Cameras!
Well, now they say deficits don’t matter, well, their deficits don’t matter. Given the aftermath of the eight year toga party that was the Bush administration and a heavily weighted Republican Congress, they leave a pile of beer cans and pizza boxes that has to be cleaned up by the next occupant of Dubya’s Delta House. It’s a nasty job. A lot of cleaning and repainting and carpentry. Importantly, a lot of non-romantic labors, and that’s just to get the house back into some kind of decent order. Quite a clean up when it’s on the national level, one that will require some real pain for all. And when in a few years the economy recovers, and the needed reduction in the debt and deficit inherited from the Bush years begins, a President Obama will have to raise taxes, and make some unpopular decisions. And then? Roll the cameras! Here comes the reconstituted GOP with its anti-tax, anti-government, anti-regulation messages, messages that, to an electorate in the midst of an economic recovery, sound like “Hey everybody, let’s TOGA!!”
No More Sequels!
It almost seems scripted. In fact, in an eerie way, it is. Republican “misgovernment,” I believe, purposely sows the seeds of distrust in government solutions and encourages a mammoth financial cost that each succeeding Democratic party is left to address. Each time the Republicans get their hands on the till, they then reduce government revenue, and undermine government agencies with poor leadership and underhanded politics. Their tax policies, deregulation manias, and privatization programs enrich the already wealthy — in the Bush years billionaires bloomed while the middle class wilted — and these income distribution changes are hard to reverse. Unfortunately, the public, in good times, seems to buy into their mantra that all government is suspect, or as Grandpa Reagan said, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” Since Reagan, GOP “accomplishments” have led to a continual dismantling of the sense of neighborly, cooperative citizenship instilled during the Roosevelt years when Depression was the result of Hoover’s laissez faire policies and rampant selfishness. The cycle will likely continue with President Obama, unless he inherits an economy that provides an “FDR moment.” In that case, Republican laissez faire economics may again languish for decades. Imagine . . . . . . .
permanent
