Comic Argus Hamilton, on Newt Gingrich addressing GOP governors.
Twenty Stealth Bombers at $2.4 Billion each, that have no mission except to deliver nuclear weapons to the nonexistent USSR avoiding nonexistent radars on the way. How many targets are worth $48 Billion? The U.S. already spends six times as much on armaments as every conceivable adversary put together! Not even counting our allies. More toys for macho males fantasies of holding the world in thrall by force. Killing machines for Macho Men! raygun borrowed and spent $3,000,000,000,000.00 on armaments. That's $30,000 for every taxpayer. We, the middle class are paying interest on the loan,to whom else? the super rich!
Now Newt and his gang are planning to cut $2 billion in food aid (total) that provides milk and food to one million women, infants, and children. Less costly than than a single bomber, but unacceptable to Gingrich the Greedy, who stole Christmas. Family values?! After they're born, the health of children no longer concerns the Right. Children live under bridges because raygun's HUD secretary diverted $41 Million to cronies and consultants, and he was just the tip of the iceberg. That's pro-Life? I can only offer the Buddhist prayer:
"May they reap what they have sown!"
The election was a Triumph of Evil. The Year of the Angry White Male. As Jolene Unsoeld, my favorite congresswoman said, after being deposed by a stealth candidate of the Religious Reich: "It was a victory of 'I got Mine, of anger, and of hate.'" Old Vicious Spiteful Greedy Racist White Testosterone-Poisoned Macho Heterosexual Males, in short, Blue Meanies.
May they reap what they have sown!
Witness the absurd focus on gays in the military! Even (General) Barry Goldwater knows that gays have been in uniform since Caesar's time, so what's the big deal? My theory: the military wants to keep using Fear of Being Considered Gay (homophobia) as a psychological bludgeon by which to get impressionable youth to commit murder upon demand lest they be taunted and considered "less than male." God bless the men who are able to resist such brainwashing! The military should be about defending the country, not about enforcing violent sexist hetero male stereotypes! Newt's solution to the Tailhook Scandal: make it illegal for women to sue the military for sexual harassment!
May they reap what they have sown!
I'm outraged and aghast that a 92-year old segregationist, racist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who still calls black men "Boy!" will head a Senate Committee. His type should have died out when the North won the Civil War! The "race card" has been played far too long as an Angry White Male strategy of the GOP. Shame!
May they reap what they have sown!
The greed part is interesting. Most of the people who vote this line are, at the same time, being swindled. Killing the capital gains tax will help the middle class not a whit. The Blue Meanie, being none too bright, is willing to cut off his face to spite his nose, cut his own taxes 2% but those of the Super-Rich by 100%. State Universities are already being forced to close departments, so his kids won't be able to afford an education. He'll give up college tuition just so an "undeserving" racial minority won't have it either.
The America we saw in November is a survivalist gun nut who lives out in the woods, beats his wife, keeps his kids home from school, uses their lunch money to buy ammunition, and subsists by shaking down his neighbors and stealing from them. The Schoolyard Bully Writ Large. Like all scams, it depends on the dishonesty of the victim, our Meanie.
May his nightmare be brief!
Shrink the middle class, give the Multinational Greed Machines more money to close down factories in the U.S. and set up forced labor camps and toxic waste dumps in the Third World. Thanks, GATT! Now capitalists, and only capitalists will decide about labor and the environmental. If pollution add to their short term profits, pollution there will be. The poor will pay for the cleanup and suffer the cancers. Elected officials will have no say whatsoever. The clothes you buy will be made with child labor in Malaysia and Mexico and forced labor in China or Occupied Tibet. China's plans for Tibet are the same as Hitler had for Poland. Genocide. Boeing says we have to trade with them, and it's "Unfair" to put human rights conditions on trade. Trickle down?
You can't piss down my back and expect me to believe it's raining!
Bob'n'Newt's "Contract On America" will balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the middle class. It will require that Social Security be phased out by the year 2020 in order to pay for more weaponry, interest due the wealthy on debt created subsidizing their military, mining and timber interests. We are subsidizing their rape of the planet! The aim of Corporate America, and their minions in the Congress, is to cripple the government with term limits (only, you will note, in libera l states: there are no plans to limit the terms of Thurmond or Helms) and balanced budget amendments, so that Government will be powerless to oppose them. GATT is just the beginning. All power will reside in a few Scrooges in Country Clubs and Lear Jets. And Newt wants to bring back workhouses and orphanages. Slavery ? Debtors Prison, anyone? Your eight year old can always work in the mines after Child Labor Laws are abolished by the GATT committee. You will be powerless to stop them. Always amazes me how libertarians say Government Equals Bad, but somehow Corporate Greed Equals Good?
Bah! Humbug!
Bad as the economic Right Wing is, they are eclipsed by the "Religious." The New Inquisition. The Fourth Reich. We gays are the Jews of the Religious Reich: scapegoats for failure of society to conform to their maniacal visions of world domination by force. Somehow we're also to blame when their wives object to being kept barefoot and pregnant! Pat Buchanan declared "cultural war" with the full blessing of George Bush, and their extremist leadership has called for extermination of gays. I won't go quietly! My "Gay Agenda" has been to live quietly with a lover, do good professional work, pay taxes, support charities and the arts, ... and not get fired or thrown out of my home on account of my private life. Why do they find it so threatening ? There's something inside themselves that they hate and they're projecting it onto us, and lashing out against... And the "Liberal Press." What's so liberal about the Hearst Family? About General Electric NBC?
It is important to sniff out the religious right, who have shown a pattern of running "stealth candidates" for school boards and such. Once in, they reveal their agendas: outlaw the teaching of science when it contradicts their (ridiculous ) creationist ideology, and stop the flow of desperately needed information about human sexuality from being imparted in classes. Their innate hostility to all forms of liberty and free expression. They want to end liberty in this country, and enforce their own patriarchial authoritarian crap. Jesus said "people will persecute you and say they are doing it in my name." Jesus was right!
May the "religious" fascists come to come to terms with themselves, or failing that, do themselves in before it is too late for all of us!
Scant consolation: traitor. liar, and felon Oliver North failed to join the Senate. Nonentity Huffington, a Quayle's Quayle of a dunce, failed to dislodge Feinstein in California.
May the Right's Reign of Error be short-lived. May they run aground before they leave harbor! May failure dog their every step!
Langston Hughes prayed, "Let America be America the Good, the America that has never been, but might be." That is emphatically not Gingrich Amerika.
Amen.
Further Reading. Many of the facts and figures can be found in the writings of Kevin Phillips, a Republican who worked for Nixon. "The Politics of Rich and Poor" is a good place to begin to survey the damage done to the American middle class by raygunomics. His latest is called "the Boiling Point."
On foreign policy, Noam Chomsky is a dissident's dissident, and impeccably logical.
Well, I guess I've run out of steam. God help us, every one! It may be a turbulent time ahead!