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?

Memo to GOP Members of Congress

Dear Stupid Motherfuckers:

George W. Bush has left the White House in disgrace and nobody gives a shit about him now. Take your blinders off and face the fact that the Obama and the Democrats stomped your asses in November. You’re a minority party of bankrupt ideas, and becoming more irrelevant every day. You’ve got no irons in the fire or light at the end of the tunnel. If you keep calling on the ghost of Ronald Reagan, taking advice from shitheads like Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh, and pinning your hopes on morons like Sarah Palin, you deserve to spend a generation in the political sticks.

It’s obvious that you fucks haven’t accepted that the Bush/Cheney criminal syndicate ran the United States into the ground through incompetence, greed, politics, spite, power trips and total disregard for the fundamentals of government, law, economics and morality. You bastards controlled the entire Federal apparatus for six of Bush’s eight years – and have nothing but failure to show for it.

Here’s the thing: this isn’t the time for you hypocrites to whine that Obama’s stimulus package contains too much spending and not enough tax cuts. Because of the tax-cutting frenzy the GOP pulled off during the Bush Reign of Error, we’re all Keynesians now. The shit is up to our necks and Obama’s stimulus plan isn’t nearly large enough. Every day you idiots spew your tax-cut bullshit the financial woes of real flesh and blood Americans worsen. We need massive public spending on infrastructure, aid to states and small businesses, food stamps and unemployment insurance – all investment that provide real stimulus, as opposed to the negligible benefits of giving the wealthiest Americans another tax holiday.

Fuck the rich and every one of you who carry water for them. It’s time for them to pay their fair share – and for you piss-ants to support the real economy of wage earners and producers, of teachers and small business owners, of waitresses and secretaries and truck drivers.

Word Up, Assholes: Tax cuts are not a substitute for economic policy. Ronald Reagan was a man, not a God, and for most of his Presidency he doddered around in the early stages of Alzheimer’s; Ronnie got lost in the hallways of the White House, forgot the way to the Oval Office, and believed Alaska had been invaded by the Soviet Union.

Listen, losers, get with Obama’s program – it’s not perfect but it’s necessary.