Last updated on August 11th, 2012 at 07:23 pm
The concept of moving backward in time prior to a specific moment or event has been a fantasy of human beings who would change the course of events for their own benefit, or to alter the course of history for the betterment of mankind. Only a lunatic would want go back in time and alter events to recreate disasters, but there are human beings capable of such evil intentions. Republicans have sought to return to the Bush Administration’s disastrous events that nearly crashed the world’s economy and embroiled America in two Middle East wars, and besides Willard Romney’s promise to repeat Bush’s mistakes, Congressional Republicans have attempted to erase President Obama’s accomplishments through perpetual repeal attempts of legislation that’s contrary to their twisted conservative ideology. For nearly two years, Americans have looked on in disbelief at some of the Republican’s policies and agendas that can only be labeled sheer lunacy, but still, they are marching forward despite their agenda portends dark times for America and its citizens.
This week, there were two instances of lunacy in the Republican Party that cannot be overlooked because they epitomize the madness rampant in the conservative movement that is becoming frightening for the potential for catastrophe if they were to be successful. As is often the case with insanity, both examples characterize stupidity and evil the GOP has demonstrated since Barack Obama was elected President.
In the Missouri Republican primary race, congressman Todd Akin won the right to challenge Democrat Claire McCaskill for Senate, and he represents the party well as a typical Republican lunatic. However, challenging him for the crown of crazy is Rep. Steve King of Iowa who said he would like to introduce a bill that, once enacted, would nullify every single law President Barack Obama has signed over the last three years. That’s right, King wants to time travel back to January 19, 2009 and enact Republican austerity measures that would all but guarantee that America, as we know it, would cease to exist. King and Akin represent the worst of humanity and demonstrate they have no compunction sending every American who is not uber-wealthy into to throes of poverty and despair because an African American man is sitting in the Oval Office.
Todd Akin wants to impeach the President because, according to him, “he ignores the Constitution, ignores the laws, wants to impose all of the czars, ignores the economy, causes trillion-dollar-plus deficits every year, and is a complete menace to our civilization.” Akin is running on a platform that hands Social Security to Wall Street, abolishes the minimum wage, privatizes Medicare, preserves taxpayer subsidies for big oil and gas companies, and considers federal student loans “Stage III cancer” that must be excised to save humanity and the American way of life. The immediate question that puzzles Akin is, “what’s the best way to get rid of him?” In lieu of a defeat in November, Akin is panting for Republicans to take control of both houses of Congress to begin immediate impeachment hearings for the imagined offenses listed above. However, Akin’s wet dream of impeachment pales in comparison to Steve King’s dream of one piece of legislation that would nullify every single law President Barack Obama has signed over the last three years.
Perhaps King’s insanity erased his memory of the events of 2008, but it is worth examining some of the conditions he yearns to revisit. When the President was inaugurated, the nation was hemorrhaging three-quarters-of-a-million jobs each month, the market was hovering around 6,000, the American automobile industry was collapsing, banks were raping the economy without pause for lack of regulation, health insurance companies were stealing Americans’ healthcare dollars with no recompense, and women experienced pay discrepancies based entirely on their gender. For the record, King voted against TARP that saved the world from an economic depression the likes the world has never seen, and opposed the bailout that saved the American automobile industry. He also voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus) and has opposed every measure that kept America from recovering from the Bush-Republican economic catastrophe. Subsequently, if King had his way, 4-million jobs created by the stimulus would vanish, the million-plus jobs in the auto industry would not exist, and the prospect of 30 million Americans having access to affordable health insurance would be a pipe-dream. According to King, the solution to the Republican economic recession of 2008 was “insisting upon a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution,” because “we don’t have five years before we go off the cliff into the abyss of an economic collapse for our country.”
If King could travel back in time and erase the President’s legislative accomplishments, America would have gone off the cliff in 2009. Whether or not any American liked the idea of TARP, it did prevent a world-class depression that would still be ravaging every country on Earth, but that is the scenario King’s “balanced budget” solution would surely guarantee. In fact, at the rate the country’s economy was going in January 2009, without immediate infusion of cash into the economy, there would have been no United States budget to balance as tax revenue dried up due to millions-of-Americans losing their jobs that the President’s stimulus staunched.
It is unclear what happened to the Republican Party over the past few years, but by all accounts, they have gone completely off the rails. It began on Inauguration night when Republican leaders gathered to plot a course of economic obstruction and has continued unabated as they oppose every economic measure the President proposed to jumpstart the economy and put Americans back to work. Their insanity is best appraised by their fierce resistance to measures that are Republican staples in a sluggish economy such as increasing government spending, hiring public sector workers, giving tax cuts to working families, and the sentiment that “deficits don’t matter.” What happened was a Black man was elected President and switched on every Republican’s recessive insanity gene that drives them to do everything in their power to subvert economic recovery and kill jobs to increase the American people’s pain they started during the Bush administration.
There are many, many pundits who claim the GOP was hijacked by teabaggers elected during the 2010 midterm elections, but that does not account for their obstruction to economic recovery in January 2009. Now, King wants to nullify all of President Obama’s progress that saved the economy to finally destroy America once and for all. Todd Akin is hardly any more sane than King, and his ridiculous agenda of handing Americans’ retirement to Wall Street so they can squander it in the next market crash is nearly as insane as abolishing the federal minimum wage and impeaching the President for imaginary crimes against Ayn Randian economic ideology.
America cannot survive another Bush-Republican economic agenda and maybe that is the Republicans’ strategy all along; break the government, allow corporations and Wall Street to take control of the nation’s assets, and wage perpetual war in a Crusade to stamp out Islam from every nation on Earth. It may sound like pure lunacy, but no more than resetting the legislative clock to January 19, 2009 and passing a balanced budget amendment, abolishing the federal minimum wage, and handing $2.7 trillion to Wall Street when America was teetering on the edge of economic collapse.
Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn't look good.
Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.
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