Sandy Knauer started a post called "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" designed to keep the spotlight on our politicians. This is my 2nd post in keeping with that goal.
Dear Senator Kyl:
Thank you for your recent response to my letter asking why you are not supporting economic stimulus. Your reply said that while your party believes stimulus is needed, your input of good ideas was ignored. Without elaborating on those good ideas, your response launched into an attack on a few specific aspects of the administration's proposed bill.
During the first eight years of this millenium, the Congress, led by your party, voted to abrogate its constitutional responsibilities to the Executive Branch: you allowed the President to violate the Constitution by spying on American citizens, torturing anyone it chose to and by claiming the right to invalidate laws through signing statements. You allowed the Executive Branch to unilaterally launch a devastating war based upon false evidence, branding anyone who disagreed as unpatriotic supporters of terrorism. Your party oversaw the dismantling of rules and regulations designed to protect American citizens from the very excesses you now decry, thereby transferring huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite.
Now you claim that your party has "good ideas, which have been proposed and rejected by the other side". Yet the letter in which you make that claim, the very format which can speak directly to your constituents, contained none of those ideas. Instead, it mentioned without elaboration "relief for taxpayers", which can only mean more tax cuts - the same solution your party has proposed for every economic problem for the past thirty years.
Glenn Greenwald wrote recently in Salon about the new public outrage over the AIG bonuses:
The overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? The overarching question is: why has there been so little? A political establishment that can function without any fear of the citizenry will inevitably trample on its interests. That is what has been happening more than anything else. And it is why we need far more public outrage, and fear of that outrage more deeply implanted in the minds of our political and financial elites.
-- Glenn Greenwald
I believe this public outrage is long overdue and that your party will feel the brunt of it for a long time unless you begin to address it more directly and honestly than in your response to my letter.
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Comments: 17
There are two reasons for this strategy:
1. The Democratic plan includes tax cuts for the middle class and tax increases for the rich. This is in direct violation of the (long discredited) Reaganomics principle that economic prosperity is guaranteed if we cut taxes for the rich and powerful, because they will voluntarily pass their new wealth down to the lower economic classes. The only President who did not follow this course for the last thirty years is Bill Clinton. Needless to say, all the rest were Republicans.
1. If Obama and the Democrats are successful in rescuing the country from the mess that Bush and the Republicans handed them, they (Republicans) will be consigned to the political scrap heap for a long time to come. Their only hope...which was (honestly, at least) articulated by Rush Limbaugh...is that the Democrats must fail. So their determined resistance to any plan that could succeed is understandable...given that their goal is Republican political hegemony, regardless of the economic consequences for the nation.
On your first idea...doing away with political parties...you might enjoy reading my take on it HERE.
On term limits...I used to advocate them too, but learning the ropes in Congress is a daunting task that probably takes most new Congressmen several years. So limiting people to a six years guarantees that we would always have a government of "learners."
I think the limit should be a bit longer...maybe ten years.
Kacie: that's funny! "Dear Senator Frist: I've got this bump on my butt. Please have a look and tell me whether you think it looks like Tom Delay or Dick Armey."
Gary...I think Republicans have come with a strategy to try to salvage whatever they can from their defeat and Obama's victory.
Their rationale goes like this: Obama has a plan to rescue the economy. If he is successful, we are toast. Therefore, we must make sure he fails! Given the magnitude of the problems, there is a very good chance that whatever he does, it will not be 100% successful in the next two years, so if we just oppose EVERYTHING that he is doing, and try to limit the "damage" (i.e., improvement) we have a fair chance of making some headway in the midterm elections. To do this, we must try to undermine any program that might improve the economy, and our publicly stated reason for this is: It's too expensive. Never mind that our guys Bush and Cheney spent a trillion on a stupid war, and almost that much on blank-check handouts last year. Now, we must become devout protectors of the public purse, opposing with all the rectitude we can muster any deficits proposed by the Democrats. We know it will require huge deficits to rescue the economy. If we can prevent or minimize deficit spending, Obama doesn't have a chance, and we will have a better chance to boost our political power in Congress, and maybe even "rescue" the Presidency from the Democrats in 2012.