Republican Governance... If They Manage To Seize Power Next Month

Yesterday there was a horrifying story about pure Republican governance in a small town in Tennessee in which the fire department sat around watching a family's home burn down because of what amounted to adherence to the Randian/Hobbesian ideological purity that afflicts so many unbalanced Republicans of late. "The local neighborhood is furious?" They should think about it when they go to the polls on November 2. Everyone should. Watch:



For the last 75 years that same Republican Party's biggest dream has been to dismantle Social Security, a problem for them, since it is the single most popular government project. But now they smell a fresh opportunity even where Bush failed so miserably in the latest GOP attempt ("privatization"). And that's not all they want to dismantle. If you've read Mike Lux's brilliant and inspiring book, The Progressive Revolution, you can see how they can draw up a list of ways to turn back the clock on everything conservative fought so hard to prevent, not just Social Security, but Medicare, public education, child labor laws, equality for genders, races, religious and ethnic groups, the fight of workers to organize and bargain collectively, national parks, consumer and worker protections... eventually, the right-wing Dream of Dreams: abolish the minimum wage and then, believe it or not, reinstate a form of serfdom or slavery. While some of the right-wing candidates, like Linda McMahon (R-CT) and Rob Portman (R-OH), are taking the traditional GOP position, that the minimum wage should be lower (and lower and lower and lower), the worst of the teabaggers, from Rand Paul in Kentucky, Ken Buck in Colorado, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Sharron Angle in Nevada to Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania and Joe Miller in Alaska are claiming the minimum wage is unconstitutional and should be abolished.

So how do a bunch or billionaires and corporate bottomliners get a few million angry white morons to lobby for an agenda that will turn them into slaves? Welcome to the politics of hate-- The Tea Party. Over the weekend, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown did an OpEd for USAToday about fighting back against the faux populism of the coopted teababggers.

for generations, conservatives have appealed to fear to protect the privileged and preserve the status quo-- fear of immigrants, fear of diversity, fear of big government. For conservatives in 2010, it's easy:

"Stop."

"No."

"Repeal."

Meanwhile, for more than a century-- in churches and temples, in union halls and neighborhood centers, in the streets and at the ballot box-- progressives have moved the country forward. Progressives brought us minimum wage and Social Security in the 1930s, civil rights and Medicare in the 1960s, and health care and Wall Street reform in 2010.

Opponents of these accomplishments-- some of society's most privileged and well-entrenched interest groups-- have not changed much. The John Birch Society of 1965 has bequeathed its fervor and extremism to the Tea Party of 2010.

History tells us that rage on the right should not be confused with populism. The far right attacks government regulation as it feeds Wall Street and the insurance companies. It rails against government spending for the least privileged as it lavishes tax cuts favoring the most privileged.

No one should be surprised over what has happened in the last 18 months:

•We passed health care reform, so the insurance companies are coming after us at election time.

•We enacted consumer protections for homeowners and credit card users, so Wall Street is spending millions to defeat us.

•We worked to end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas, and now large multinational corporations are doing everything possible to beat us.

We already know the damage that comes from the right's rage. During President Clinton's eight years, our country added more than 22 million private sector jobs, incomes went up, and we enjoyed the largest budget surplus in U.S. history.

In the following eight years of the Bush administration, only 1 million jobs were added, incomes stagnated or plummeted for most Americans, and we were left with record budget deficits.

Yet Republican candidates in 2010 are offering the same faux populism and "solutions" of the Bush years: more tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of special interests, and trade agreements that cost us millions of manufacturing jobs. And in places like my state of Ohio, they are even offering up as candidates the same people who got us into this mess.

To fight back, progressives must talk about the historic accomplishments of the last 18 months in specific, understandable terms:

•We saved the U.S. auto industry in the face of naysayers' exhortation to "let the market work," and our efforts preserved hundreds of thousands of jobs.

•We passed health care reform that improves drug benefits for senior citizens, provides coverage to those with a pre-existing condition, allows a 22-year-old daughter home from college to stay on her parents' insurance, and promises health care for millions of Americans.

•We made college more affordable for students and passed historic legislation for our nation's veterans and for equal pay for women.

If you have a 401(k), take a look at it today and compare it with the day before President Obama was inaugurated. Back then, 750,000 jobs were being lost each month, with 22 consecutive months of job loss costing 8 million jobs. We've got a long ways to go, but this year we've seen eight straight months of private sector job growth.

Is this enough?

No, which is why progressives must rally and persevere.

The Tea Party vision of 21st century America would gut Medicare and Social Security, ignore the minimum wage, and scale back consumer protections and regulations that keep Wall Street honest and our food supply safe. It seems to me that Tea Party activists, increasingly influential in the Republican Party, do not seem to much like America the way we are.

Tea Party populism is driven by anger at our government and at our country. Real populism fights for all Americans, while Tea Party populism divides us.

Even mainstream conservative Republicans are worried about the agenda of the Tea Party Republicans an agenda which seems like a mish-mash of John Birch Society paranoia, old fashioned Know Nothing/KKK style racism and bigotry, and every sort of fringe psychosis that's come down the political pike in the last century or so. This post singles out Rand Paul, admittedly one of the craziest of the lot, but is he really more dangerous to America than Pat Toomey or Sharron Angle or Ron Johnson? They all share a deepseated abhorence for America as an ideal, even if they love the idea of America as a place to exploit people and get rich.

Rand Paul has hijacked the Tea Party movement to appropriate it to his family’s radical brand of libertarianism. Led by Lew Rockwell and Thomas Woods, two of Ron Paul’s most prominent boosters, the ‘paleo-libertarian’ movement that the Pauls belong to has done a pretty good job of hiding its fringe elements from the eye of the mainstream media and the broader public.

Rand Paul has not been as active as his father in this movement, but from the available evidence, we know that at the very least, he is a fellow-traveler. Paul is on record as believing in a conspiracy to create a “North American Union,” warning ominously of the imminence of a new currency called the “amero.” He regularly sits down to chat with radio talk show host Alex Jones, a man who believes that the United States government is behind 9/11. Rockwell, infamous for his pro-Confederate views, has been boosting Rand Paul since the start, and has sat down to interview him. (Playing a simple game of connect-the-dots, is it any wonder that a man like this wants to abolish the Federal Reserve? Has anyone asked him about the Bilderberg Group yet?)

...At the heart of everything, Rand Paul, like his father, is an ideologue, and the rules of Congress do not cater to ideologues.

Because of Rand Paul’s ideological rigidity, we face this reality: no matter who wins in Kentucky in November, the Republicans have lost a key vote on many major issues. We should at least honor sanity by sending the man to Congress who doesn’t affiliate himself with anti-American conspiracy theorists.

Yes, they do seem to be urging conservatives to vote for Jack Conway! It's expecting a bit much to have conservative voters actually cast their ballots for progressives but something tells me-- including recent polls-- that as more and more voters start focusing in on who Sharron Angle is and who Ron Johnson is and who Christine O'Donnell and Ken Buck and Pat Toomey are... they'll just sit this one out. Oh, yeah... And John Raese, a Republican who actually manages to be worse than the worst Democrat running for anything anywhere: