|
Edited on Thu Sep-04-03 10:03 PM by arendt
The GOP is as dumb as a box of hammers by arendt
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." -anon
Civilization, by its very definition, has in place workable solutions to everyday problems. Only complicated, large-scale, system-level problems challenge well-functioning technologically-sophisticated societies.
For example, we have plenty of car mechanics and gas station operators to service our cars on an everyday basis; but the oil and gas industry as a whole is faced with intractable system-level problems: we are rapidly burning through our supply of oil, CO2 is creating climate change, marine oil spills, smog, to name the most obvious.
The U.S. political parties are really two different cultures when it comes to addressing such system level problems. The Democrats are technocrats. They believe in letting experts study the problem and propose well-founded solutions. They trust the scientific method. As true stewards of America's resources, they try to plan for the long term
The GOP on the other hand are anti-intellectual, unethical, short-term maximizers. Furthermore, their recent power grab has revealed their true anti-scientific mind set. They told the EPA to lie about the 911 air pollution. They have appointed religious quacks to health care positions. They have killed research into alternative, renewable energy. Their pollster Frank Luntz has argued in favor of continuing their phony propaganda campaign against the validated scientific fact of global climate change. In short, the GOP haven't changed since the Indiana legislature of the late 1800s declared pi to be 22/7. They continue to try to legislate Natural Law.
Its not that they don't know this is impossible. Rather, they can't pass up all the profits to be made by deliberately doing what is expedient, and oftentimes, counterproductive. They figure that they can get paid now for screwing things up, and get paid later for finally doing it right.
Case in point: the recent electrical grid outage. As Joshua Micah Marshall has pointed out, the GOP always has plans on the shelf, which they put into action when an excuse can be found or manufactured. So, with the blackout as an excuse, the GOP wants to drill for more oil, remove pollution controls on power plants, and deregulate energy prices.
This is a classic case of fixing the part of the system that is not broken, but is very profitable to fix. (Like the car mechanic who wants to rebuild the engine when all your really need is new sparkplugs..)
It was the transmission lines (a.k.a. the grid) which caused the blackout, not any lack of electricity, nor any lack of oil to generate electricity. And why did the grid fail? Because the previously-enacted energy deregulation made power plant ownership profitable, but left transmission systems unprofitable. Hence, the grid is in disrepair.
Yet, here is the GOP shilling for more profit-friendly, non-solutions to the problem. This deregulation game is as much quackery as medieval blood letting. When the so-called cure fails, say that not enough blood was let - i.e., we need even more deregulation. Then, *if* the patient recovers on his own, the blood-letters claim success. If the patient dies, the blood-letters claim they were prevented from taking enough blood. What a detestable and homicidal racket!
At a higher level, the return of voodoo economics (i.e., supply-side tax breaks for the rich) should cause any working person with a memory of the 1980s to run for the pitchforks and scythes. Anyone with a brain can see that it is lack of demand that has broken an economy where jobs have been sent overseas and sweatshop production is a glut on the market. Anyone who witnessed the 1980s is seeing the same scenario play out: rich get free money but don't invest in factories because there are no customers in a jobless recovery; rich instead put money into stocks, which rise in a bubble, eventually to crash. No matter that we all saw this a mere 20 years ago; no matter that economists across the board are flashing warnings about the deficit. The GOP goes on with its tribal chant for tax breaks for the rich.
Other examples of fixing what ain't broke include:
- Building profitable prisons and even socially abhorrent private prisons, rather than spending some money subsidizing low wage jobs that can give marginal people a chance to lead honest lives. It costs $30-50,000 a year to keep a person in prison; and that number will only go up as the prison population becomes older and unhealthier. It would be a lot cheaper to subsidize a $15,000 a year job up to a living wage $30,000 job, and a lot healthier for the society. We now spend more as a country on prisons than we do on schools. That is a disgrace; but it is highly profitable for some.
- Mandating statewide and nationwide standardized tests for school graduation, instead of giving teachers smaller classes and decent buildings. The difficult, hard to quantify, and hard to profit from work of lighting the spark of learning in a young mind is replaced by profitable, quantifiable testing. Too bad our children will become rote-learned zombies in the process. But, hey, its profitable. I can't wait to see if evolution will be in the standardized biology test!
The complicit corporate media enables these propaganda campaigns by refusing to provide historical context. On the contrary, they do they absolute best to totally deconstruct the timeline and the actual numbers so that rational argument is replaced by a few aberrant anecdotes, repeated ad nauseam. The GOP is a broken clock. It is right twice a day, and wrong the rest of the time. But with Fox News, you only get to look at the two seconds out of twenty four hours that supports the GOP viewpoint.
Its really time to stop these hammer-swinging maniacs before they smash up our entire civilization with their simple-minded, greedy, absolutely ethics-free pursuit of the shortest-term profit.
I nominate Toxic Tom Delay, whose nickname is appropriately "the hammer", as poster child for GOP ignorance, intolerance, and lack of ethics. That he and the GOP are wrecking the country is correct 24 hours a day. We should call the GOP the BOH - the box of hammers.
on edit: fix typos
|