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http://www.411mania.com/politics/columns/97070Clueless II: GOP Congratulates Itself on Opposing the Stimulus
Posted by Robert Zimmer on 02.17.2009
Rooting for the economy to fail? Virtual smoke and mirrors can't conceal the emptiness of today's Republican Party.
It's really sad watching the Republican Party run in circles inside its own self-created hall of mirrors. Their opposition to the recently passed stimulus package was purely an exercise in political theatre. Gone, it seems, are Republicans' interest in passing legislation to benefit anyone beyond the narrow constituency they represent – right-wing religious nutcases and the 14 people left in American who thought George W. Bush was a great steward of the economy.
House Minority leader John Boehner posted a video on Youtube of himself ranting about nobody in the House having read the 1,100-page stimulus bill.
That's an interesting bit of amnesia, given the Patriot Act was rammed through Congress in 2001 without anybody reading that legislation either. (Boehner voted for the Patriot Act, in case anyone wasn't sure.) The perma-tanned, chain-smoking Boehner made headlines in 1995 when he openly handed out checks from tobacco company lobbyists during a vote on tobacco legislation. Clearly, his character has improved in the intervening 14 years. (After the stimulus package passed, Boehner's office deleted his rant from Youtube.)
Having belatedly stumbled upon the power of viral video campaigns, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor's staff apparently found time to make a Youtube video of their own. The video declares that the GOP is "back," and they congratulate themselves on opposing the stimulus, all scored to Aerosmith's "Back in the Saddle." It's telling that a tired gang of old white men, out of fresh ideas, would choose to enlist a song from a similar group in the music business. Doesn't anyone in Cantor's office have actually job responsibilities to oh, I don't know, draft legislation? Constituent services? I guess that's just the naïve audacity of hope.
Defeated Republican presidential candidate John McCain piled on his own piece of ironic idiocy by criticizing the stimulus package as "generational theft." I'm sorry, wasn't adding four trillion dollars to the national debt during the Bush administration a bit of generational theft? For my money, if I have to go into debt, I'd rather do it to save our economy and rebuild our infrastructure, not finance tax cuts for rich people and pointless wars in the Middle East. Then again, common sense is a lost concept for Republicans, who are eager for the public to forget that it was they who presided during the ruinous last eight years.
Are there any Republicans left in Congress who are sincere in their differences with the President, or are we going to be stuck with an extended PR campaign against all of Obama's legislation? The party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt has fallen a long, long way.
Today's Republican Party is still fighting a war they lost near 80 years ago against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Worse, they're still fighting the same battles adjudicated by the Civil War and by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Inexplicably, though, they aren't trying to return to their roots – the GOP is instead using 21st century technology to rewrite history, and to celebrate their ineptitude, intolerance, and incompetence.It sickens me, as a former Republican, to see the party as it stands today, a disgraceful self-parody that long ago abandoned its founding principles. I'm not the only one. Key conservatives such as David Frum have blasted the GOP tactics in opposing the stimulus as "brain-dead."
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