Republican Party Blues

Anyone who is a Republican should be very worried about their party. An unruly triumvirate - Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele and Newt Gingrich - is highlighting a very uncomfortable discord within the Party. While the Republicans fight amongst themselves for direction after finally losing their absolute power with the election of Barack Obama, they have marginalized their core values of fiscal responsibility, moral rectitude and conservative values with complete buffoonery and braggadocio in a manner unbefitting a major political party. They have consigned themselves to attacking the President at every turn and injecting, once again, negative and divisive politics to the point where most Republicans in Congress refuse to cooperate and/or endorse any of the current economic stimulus plans that have been proposed.

Thomas Friedman sums this up well in his article published 3/10/09 in the New York Times,

"...the Republican Party behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto G.O.P. boss, said so explicitly, prompting John McCain to declare about President Obama to Politico: “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.” The G.O.P. is actually debating whether it wants our president to fail. Rather than help the president make the hard calls, the G.O.P. has opted for cat calls. It would be as if on the morning after 9/11, Democrats said they wanted no part of any war against Al Qaeda — “George Bush, you’re on your own.”"

I just think back to President Bush's terms in office where he took advantage of the generous rule; we all stand together when the country is in crisis or at war. If anyone criticized President Bush or went against the grade, they were deemed unpatriotic and would have been soundly attacked and destroyed by the media. Remember what happened to General Shinseki when he went against the President and tried to say the right thing, that we needed more initial troops for the Iraq War? Anyone remember that the Democratic Party voted lockstep with Bush and the Republicans even after winning the majority in Congress in 2006?

Now, the Republican Party is sitting around complaining, being downright nasty during a period where we need intelligent dialogue and communication. We know things are bad, all you have to do is look around. We shouldn't be watching our Republican Congresspeople acting like idiots - being petty by angrily declining small portions of the stimulus funds for their home states while taking the bulk of the money and/or adding earmarks to the new Omnibus Spending bill signed today yet screaming that there are too many. I know they are richer than most of us so they don't feel the economic hit like us regular folks but is this the best we can do when we get together and vote for these people to represent us? People so seemingly out of touch with reality.

Everyone is scared. I don't see any economists jumping up and saying everything is going to be Okay in the near term. In fact, they are all on the same page concluding that the government and its entities have to put as much money as they can into the economy to save it. The only criticism I'm seeing is that the stimulus packages are too low. Meanwhile, the Republicans are saying we shouldn't spend at all and put the country into more debt. You know, if they had stuck to their tenet of fiscal responsibility during Bush, we might very well have had the money to save ourselves. Instead they followed Bush down the road, spending us into massive deb. Now they have dismissed Bush completely as if he was never a Republican at all. Amazing.

We are not economists, we have no clue how dire the situation is but we have to do something. Maybe the current proscriptions are not right, maybe they won't help, maybe the economy has to correct itself on its own, maybe billions of dollars might be wasted as money is thrown around to save us, maybe all of this stimulus will come to naught but whatever happens, we have to hope for the best. At the very least, in unity there is strength.

During the Depression, the one beacon of hope was the President. We need to be positive because we are facing deep distress; we have to face it together if we have any chance of getting out of it. Deliberately wishing that the President and by extension the Democrats fail so it can be harped on and used as a negative during Obama's reelection bid in 2012 is all that the Republicans are hoping for. And, they don't seem to care how they get there. How sad.