My Saturday afternoon rant having watch a clip of Palin
rousing the rabble before watching a football game:
What kind of America do you want Republicans?
Do you want these economic times to tear us apart? It’s easy you know. Find your favorite
scapegoat and direct all the free-floating anxiety towards your choice. Rev up
the angry and frightened and give them something or someone to blame. This
method is a time-proven success for dismantling stable governments.
What kind of economic system do you want?
Thirty years of your Free Market theory has brought us to
the brink of a full blown depression just as the lengthy pre-1929 period of
non-regulation brought us to the Great Depression.
Oh I know you will say we never achieved your beloved free
and unfettered markets but that shows your system has always been unworkable.
You were unable to move your designs from theory to practice and make them
work. You had lots of excuses but here we are at the edge. We have had booms
and bust during these last decades while you stripped away regulation. The
result? The economy has come
crashing down. We are close to being bankrupt as a country because your ideas
are bankrupt. In the end you have
had to turn back to Washington, your nemesis, hat in hand, to save you. After
years of privatizing profits for a select few you are now more than happy to
socialize the debt you have created. (In the Free Market world of your
fantasies I would imagine football games would be played without refs and the
NFL would never consider adding controls like salary caps or having a draft to
distribute the players more equitably among the teams. Your free market football players would
always call the plays fairly and keep to the rules. Chaos? Not possible I am sure you would say.)
What kind of political system do you want?
It is clear you would be happy with a plutocracy but does
the rule of law mean anything to you other than those who rule make the
law? Do you fear the massive
growth of government surveillance?
Do you mind the politicization of our Justice Department? Do you mind
the dismantling of FEMA or the FDA?
Are you happy with the giant Department of Homeland Security and its Big
Brother connotation? Do you care about our crumbling infrastructure? Do you care if we are protecting our
ports? Or are all these things trivial in the face of that offense against All
We Hold Sacred: gay marriage? Do
you want to reach an accord between the right of women to have control over the
when another living entity can inhabit her body and the right of that living
being to be brought to viability or is this too valuable a fundraising,
crowd-rousing issue to ever resolve it?
What kind of social system do you want?
Are you planning a full retreat into walled communities when
whites become the new minority within the next three or four decades or do you
plan somehow to create an American version of Apartheid here before then? Are you going to build that wall along
our border or are you going to make this country work for all of us, white,
black, brown, Latino, Asian?
Do you want to continue letting the middle class disappear
while concentrating wealth in the hands of the few? Poor people who have known nothing else are easy to keep
underfoot. A large population of once-economically secure families slipping
into poverty is the stuff of revolutions. During the 1950’s, the time you like
to reminisce about, America was at its economic best because wealth was
equitably distributed. That is one part of the 50’s I would like to see return.
What kind of leaders to you want?
If you would even tolerate a ticket with the defamatory
Sarah Palin and her sound-bite depth of knowledge along with a man who
graduated at the bottom of his class then I think that answers the
question. If you mock an East
Coast education as elitist and long for a Joe Six-pack in the White House I
think we know your answer.
What kind of America do you want, Republicans?
