Paul Krugman, in Friday’s New York Times, brings up a point that I have railed about many times in this much less significant space. He comes at it from a different angle but it’s really the same rant.
We have all sat and listened to Mitt Romney babble about how he is such a bipartisan being, how he got the Massachusetts senate to go along with him on many issues and how Obama wasn’t able to do the same with the blocked congress in Washington. Romney’s small brain thinks this is a point of which he should be proud when it is actually a point of which the entire Republican party should be ashamed.
Romney doesn’t get the fact that he was dealing with a bi-partisan congressional group that understood the need to work together with whoever the people elected for the benefit of the state. In Washington, Obama has been dealing with a nasty, petulant bunch of spoiled children who have proven that they will not let the game go on if they aren’t allowed to win. They don’t care about the people who voted against them, or even those who voted for them. All they care about is that the man who fairly won the election be blocked in every way and not allowed to be re-elected.
The fact that the President, the man who won the majority of American’s votes wanted to carry out the wishes of those voters means nothing to these degenerate hacks. All they want is what they want and America be damned. These are the same clowns that run around, proudly displaying their American flag pins and snapping to attention every time the national anthem is played at a football game or the constitution is read. Maybe they should stay at ease and pay attention to what is being said in those beautiful lyrics and that incomparable document.
These phony patriots are more interested in achieving the goals of their financial benefactors than they are those of the American people.
Krugman states, quite correctly, that the basic difference between Obama and Romney is their views on healthcare, taxes on the rich and regulation. Of course this is hard to prove as Mitt has taken to changing his views lately, depending on the audience, to which he is speaking.
The problem that Krugman points to, is that Republicans are now trying to blackmail votes through an unbelievably twisted scenario. Given the intransigence of the Republicans in congress, they say; wouldn’t it be better for the country to put Romney in office with a reasonable Democratic Senate than to put Obama in the White House with a completely 100% lock step anti-progressive Republican House that will block every move. Krugman points out that The Des Moines Register used this false reasoning as their excuse for endorsing Romney. What can anyone say to that except, they’re in Des Moines.
It’s like when I was a kid and a local punk would come into a bar and break a few bottles and the back bar mirror. We used to call that extortion and the only practical answer to it was to shoot the son of a bitch. If you didn’t it would go on and on until you were completely broke. So the answer to the Republican threat is not to crumble to it but to stand up on our hand legs and say, “Screw you. If you don’t shape up you’re gone too.”
If we give the Republicans what they want now, they will destroy the country. They will do exactly what George Bush did, because the people who are running the Republican party now are the same clowns who ran George Bush. Dumb George just took the fall.
What we have to understand, and this is where I disagree with Krugman, is that once Obama is elected, the fanatic right will have lost their principle reason for being. They can’t keep Obama from being elected a third time because the law has already done that. Mitch McConnell will have lost his reason for living and if we’re really lucky will just crumble into the dust; but more important Obama will be able to say and do anything he pleases and guaranteed that will include calling out those hardline, right wing, oligarch kowtowing, legislation blocking, traitors who abrogated their responsibility to the American people in what is hopefully a vain attempt to keep Obama from a second term.
The new indicators that came out yesterday show that the recovery is progressing under Obama. Sure it’s slow but it is still progressing. If he wins next week he will be in an unassailable position to push through the jobs bill, solve the fiscal cliff problem and institute a new Stimulus program and any Republican who has the temerity to block him will deservedly be trampled into the dirt in November of 2014.
The threat of more intransigence from the right in congress if Obama is elected is an empty death rattle. If we are dumb enough or cowardly enough to accept it we will get what we deserve. If we stand up to it and throw it back in their faces we will get a Republican party that will have to negotiate or die. It’s the way we have always treated bullies in this country. It’s the American way.
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On the very same NY Times Op-Ed page as the Krugman article, David Brooks, arguably the most intelligent right wing columnist extant spends most of his column inches extolling the virtues of President Obama. He praises Obama’s inaugural promise to embrace bi-partisanship and his actual attempts to do so in the face of a filibustering Republican Senate and lock-step House. He lauds Obama as a man who has generally behaved with integrity and who has not let us down morally, but then he goes on to attack Obama who started out his presidency with a bi-partisan team for shedding right-wing advisors after they failed to make any impression on their Tea Party brothers.
Brooks claims that Obama should have, but did not move to he center when confronted by Republican intransigence but he was already at the center when that happened. The new Republican party thinks the center is just a touch to the right of Adolph Hitler. Brooks thinks that Obama could have isolated them by building a center left majority with an unorthodox agenda but he never mentions who would have followed him down that road or what that agenda might have been. Maybe Obama might have followed that path in normal times but he was too busy dealing with the failures of the previous administration to have any spare time for political invention.
What Brooks never mentions, is that Obama was trying to solve, in four years, a problem of such immensity, that the only previous administration to have faced one of equal magnitude, Roosevelt’s, had needed twelve years and a world war to navigate its way out.
To his credit Brooks ends his column by stating that Obama has been judged by higher standards than any other president and points out that this is justified by The President’s “innate ability.”
Brooks than states unequivocally that if re-elected Obama will be freed of politics and will then face the responsibility of showing us how he would lead the country.
And that is exactly what we should be looking for. Romney, if elected will be beholden to the money that got him there, the Carl Rove’s, the Sheldon Adelson’s and the Koch brothers. Obama will be beholden to no one but the American people and he can be expected to act accordingly.