An Abbreviated Honeymoon

Man, that honeymoon ended quickly. The wedding day bliss evaporated before the bridegroom got his tuxedo back from the dry cleaners. The poor guy hasn’t finished unpacking yet and his bride is already nagging him about leaving the toilet seat up and his dirty socks under the bed.

Did you really think it was going to be one of those happily ever after stories? This is no fairy tale, folks, this is blood-sport, American-style. Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners – or perhaps crows is a better description of the way Limbaugh speaks – that he hopes Barack Obama falls flat on his liberal face; Congressional Republicans, cowed and demoralized after being whipped at the polls last November, find new life in being the party of No; talk show blabbers like Sean Hannity are aghast and offended by the tax problems of Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle.

Hocus Pocus, presto and abracadabra, the felonies and foolishness of the Bush/Cheney regime are forgotten. The criminal doings of Bush/Cheney at home and abroad make Tom Daschle look like a convicted jaywalker and Geithner like an altar boy whose only crime was knocking over a chalice full of wine. After eight years of fraud, waste and abuses of power that would have made Richard Nixon blush and Ronald Reagan wet his Depends, the Republicans are suddenly hell bent on protecting the American people from wasteful Government spending. The party that for six of Bush’s eight years ladled out pork like the pot was bottomless, have suddenly found their inner fiscal conservative.

Have ye hypocrites learned nothing?

The root of the problem for the Republicans isn’t the stimulus plan – it’s Barack Obama himself. Obama has more charisma, grace and smarts in his left pinky toe than John McCain, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner combined; the only venue where John Boehner can energize a crowd the way Obama does just by walking onto the stage is in his dreams. We’re dealing with frightened old white guys here that desperately want to protect the status quo. They want to bring Obama to ground by showing him the way power in Washington really works. The message is that soaring rhetoric and adoring crowds is one thing, navigating DC’s piranha invested waters without losing a limb is another. GOP leaders want to rub Obama’s nose in the dirt of the Rose Garden and prevent his Administration from developing any momentum; they call this deliberate sabotage Principle, but everyone save Rush Limbaugh’s devoted flock calls it Republican Politics As Usual. This is the game the GOP plays while average citizens lose their homes, their jobs, and their retirement nest eggs.

McCain, McConnell and Boehner know that if Obama’s stimulus plan were to slow the economic meltdown in the short run, and lay a new foundation upon which a more just and broad American Dream might be built in the long term, that the GOP could find itself on the power fringe for two or three decades. Were Obama to achieve a few solid legislative victories and gain momentum, an appetite for real and deeper change might take root, and tilt public policy in favor of average citizens rather than corporate elites, investors and the well-to-do.

And we can’t have that in America, can we?