If the knuckleheads inside the Beltway – and I exclude very few from that description – allow this latest business of increasing the National Debt ceiling to spiral out of control and somehow do additional damage to a badly limping economy than it already has, I am going to blow a gasket.
I don’t know precisely what that entails, but I elucidate thusly as a means of indicating that after spending the better part of a quarter of century truly worrying about the scope of the National Debt, it’s simply infuriating to see the posers in the so-called Tea Party blithely come along and profess to be at the forefront of said concern.
Where was this rag-tag group of self-anointed patriots when Ronald Reagan launched the hateful ideology of “Trickle Down” economics in the 1980s that offered the Alice in Wonderland proposition that cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthiest among us would somehow reap vast benefits for the middling middle class peons at the bottom of the pyramid? Where were they when the notion of “Starve the Beast” first gained prominence in GOP ranks as a means of accelerating federal spending to such a furious pace that eventually the crisis that we wrestle with today would arrive and thoroughly disembowel the vital social programs that help prop up a troubled and dwindling middle class and those at the bottom rung of society?
I don’t recall anybody wearing Paul Revere garb protesting when the prodigal son George W. Bush slashed taxes in 2001 at the very same moment that the annual federal budget had finally been nudged into balance and even surplus by his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton. So uncomfortable was Bush and his cronies with the idea of a budget in balance that he promptly added an unsustainable drug benefit to Medicare and Medicaid, gleefully launched a pointless war in Iraq that drained resources and focus from his ostensibly more defensible war in Afghanistan. The combination of the gratuitous tax cut, Medicare and Medicaid drug boondoggle and the Iraq War proved to be a potent triple threat, literally adding trillions of dollars to the National Debt and laying the groundwork for the terrifying dilemma that we now are facing.
Mix in the fruit of that other rancid Republican canard about deregulating business that was initially championed by Reagan and then – embarrassingly – continued through the Clinton years and then put into high gear by Bush The Sequel, and we were left with a banking and investment industry ripe for the carnage that we have endured over the last three years. If you think the state of the American economy is the responsibility of the Obama Administration then you may also believe that the cancer that somebody develops in 2011 was caused by the 150 cigarettes he smoked last week rather than the 240,000 that he smoked since Reagan was sworn in as president in 1980. And yes, I did the math and even with modest numbers those are accurate and made this ex-smoker cough a bit, and I am also blaming Reagan for lung cancer as well. That assertion is as intellectually defensible as blaming President Obama for the current horrid unemployment figures.
Bear in mind that most of what you are cringing at on the television news programs is vapid posturing for next year’s election rather than genuine efforts by what we laughably call public servants to address perhaps the most serious budgetary crisis of our lifetime. While I don’t doubt that many of them are truly concerned about big-picture economics – if for no other reason than the potential devastation to the economy even imperils their own 401K stockpiles and those of their true constituents the modest to obscenely wealthy – it is still true that most of the video clips you watch today are designed for next year’s campaign blather.
And while the responsibility for all this is enormous enough to go around from end to end of the political spectrum, the country is going to make a determination at some point about who is truly responsible for the wretched maneuvering that we have had to endure for the last two-plus years. The lucid among us will likely conclude that the intransigence of the hard-right wing of the Republican Party clearly put the obsession with ousting the President so far above the quaint notion of pursuing the national good that it isn’t even debatable. That’s as damning an indictment of any political party as I’ve ever even imagined in my 60-plus years.
And just so you don’t think this is a partisan diatribe, I could point out that I started out in politics as the chairman of the Republican Party in the fifth grade at P.S. 25 in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1960. Nixon carried the admittedly unofficial vote of P.S. 25 underage constituents, perhaps because of the nifty campaign song I wrote. It is quite widely known – and demonstrably proven in numerous studies – that the more education one undertakes in his lifetime the further left he moves politically. In this instance the stereotypes are quite thoroughly reinforced.
That means that were I not opting for cremation when the time comes, I would have found myself squeezing over to the port side of the casket.
- T.S. O’Connell
