My latest column - WB
Sleeping With The GOP, Even Worse The Second Time Around
By Bill Wetzel
I once had a bad drunken one-night-stand.
In the moment, it felt right. She looked great and said all the right words to me. Told me how she always liked me. We shared common interests and had been dancing around this moment for years. It was an easy sell and we had a great time.
Then the next morning she woke up and slept with one of my friends.
As a result, I never went out with her again. No calls. Nothing. Right away, I knew better, I learned my lesson.
She could call me tomorrow, say those same right words, tell me she looks better than ever, maybe send me some pics Brett Favre-style to prove it. But this time I wouldn't be buying.
Because once you already know something is a horrible decision you would be a fool to repeat that mistake again. I know the result, I know what to expect, so no thank you, I'm fine without that kind of trouble. The short-term pleasure isn't worth the horrendous end result.
That bad one-night-stand is what comes to mind when I think about the possibility of the Republican Party taking over Congress in a landslide election victory. The American people seem drunk with righteous anger. Infuriated over problems real and imagined. And the Republicans have come along all slicked up with their new Tea Party rebranding. They look better than they did, smooth talk certain demographics with all the right words and make all those same promises that brought them to power for most of the last thirty years. They know it will feel good for a large swath of voters to go out and kick some bums out of office. Again though, that short-term pleasure is not worth the horrendous result.
We've been down this road with the Republican Party before. We know what to expect. We know their policies will fail. That their rhetoric will be even more divisive. We should know better.
But do we?
It doesn't look like it.
The country under a Republican-controlled Congress, or as most expect, at least, a GOP-controlled House of Representatives, isn't going to look any better than it ever has under Republican rule. The big problem with the possibility of Republican power at this time is it'll come at a tenuous moment in our history. As NY Times columnist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman notes: "When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the U.S. economy had strong fundamentals." The United States under Clinton was in the midst of unprecedented job creation, strong economic growth and household debt was much smaller than it is today. Krugman continues: "Today's situation is completely different. The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits""
Bluntly, in the past, we were doing well enough that bad policy and inaction could be absorbed without leading us straight into a disaster.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Sleeping-With-The-GOP-Eve-by-Bill-Wetzel-101101-549.html
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