September 14, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GOP

Hate is what drives the GOP. Republicans essentially believe that they are better than other people. People of other ethnic groups, other income groups, other religions, other races, or who are intellectuals are either inferior or a threat to all that Republicans to believe to be good and decent.

Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy used hate and a ramped up fear of Communism to advance their agendas.

Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, famous as the site where three civil rights workers were murdered, as a signal to the states' rights crowd, the people one breath away from burning crosses and wearing white hoods.

George H. W. Bush benefited from the use of ads featuring Willie Horton, a black man who was a criminal, to underline the concept that "some people" have to be kept under control and in their place. George W. Bush has made all Muslims the enemy. He has benefited from the "fear card" perhaps more than his predecessors.

John McCain is using racism even more overtly because he's actually running against an African-American candidate. This commentary is at www.bobboblog.org:

The GOP hardcore base embrace bigots and liars like McCain/Palin because in the darkness of their own souls they hold those same values. As individuals they are too dishonest to get up and admit that in public. McCain/Palin gives them permission to feel good about their own bigotry and small-mindedness. Armed with a permission slip from two major political candidates, they can give full throat to their own worst instincts. They are cowards and if they had any sense of decency they would feel a deep sense of shame and would come begging for our forgiveness.

Fortunately, the GOP hardcore base is still a minority in this country. If the serial lying of McCain/Palin proves to be ineffective at turning them into a majority, McCain/Palin will end up being tossed into the political dumpster like a tied-off plastic bag of used diapers.

THE MYTH OF SELF-CORRECTING MARKETS

Right-wingers throw out crumbs to evangelicals, making them believe that God and country are important. But the true religion of right-wingers is the "free market." We're supposed to have an unbounded faith in the free market, that it's more efficient than government, that it's "self-correcting" when things go awry. Even though right-wingers won't admit it, the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Bear Stearns before that is a tacit admission that the market isn't self-correcting after all. Government has a definite role to play in the economy. If government has a role to play for the big players, then why not for us little people? This commentary by Deborah Stone is at www.commondreams.org:

Self-interest, profits and free markets, we have been promised, are the great social engines. Now, as the American housing market collapses and the world trembles before our mistakes, those profit-driven, supposedly self-correcting and perfectly efficient engines are turning against us like Frankenstein. Why did anybody ever believe that CEOs and shareholders whose every incentive leads them to seek greater profits would care about anything else, such as their purported government mission to foster homeownership and stable communities?

Maybe this is the ultimate lesson in why the Republican strategy of privatization and deregulation doesn't work. Markets depend on confidence--confidence that somebody stands behind the currency of exchange, confidence that somebody will hold buyers and sellers to their promises, and above all, confidence that if banks and big businesses crash, somebody will step in to help all the little people who might be wiped out with them.

It's telling that the very officials who have been dead-set against regulation and bailouts justify the new government plan as necessary to restore confidence. The markets are perfectly healthy, they kept saying, but the public's confidence is faltering. On July 17, just after the big bailout was proposed, Fannie Mae's CEO, Daniel Mudd, told Newshour's Judy Woodruff, "Fannie Mae is very financially sound. We have . . . more capital than we've had at any point in our history." If your capitalization is as strong as you say, asked Woodruff, why do you need this Treasury plan to help you out? "All the capital markets, the lending markets, are really built on confidence," Mudd replied. "Confidence has gotten jittery over the past quarter or so." It's important, he continued, "that there be a strong backstop (Mudd never uttered the words "bailout" or "rescue") in case that kind of lack of confidence and that kind of jitteriness continued for too long."