For those of you who are trying, and how could it be anything but unsuccessfully, to understand just what the hell it is, that congress does – I sympathize but offer no hope. We exist in a country that is desperately in need of a minimum wage improvement, immigration reform, additional health care legislation, education reform, voter registration protection, environmental regulation, budgetary and tax re-workings and a serious look at gun regulation, none of which are our legislators paying attention to as this is written. What they have already decided to do is forgo their responsibilities, until after the elections, five months in the future.
But wait! Suddenly there is a clarion cry for attention to a matter so important that it pushes all the above mentioned problems to the gutter, a matter so demanding of our national attention that it forces every patriot to leap to the fore and stand ready to fight to his or her last breath for God, country and the brother’s Koch.
No, I’m not speaking about teenaged girls being sold into sexual slavery by hopped up Islamic terrorists, nor am I speaking of nuclear threats from drugged out North Korean dictators or freaked out Sharia infected Iranian mullahs. What I am referring to, is the long dead, never actually real, question of what happened on that fateful night in Benghazi and why anyone should care about any part of that hacked over tale except who we should kill in retaliation.
It was a war, guys. Shit happens in war. What the White House did wrong was not holding up the time out sign and announcing that, we were in the middle of a combat situation and as soon as the CIA told them what the hell was going on, they would be glad to tell the rest of the country. They didn’t do that. They were stupid. They made a political decision instead of a strategic decision and now the Republicans have made it into a political farce.
Benghazi wasn’t any more horrific than any number of combat disasters that have all but gone uninvestigated during this, the Bush, and any number of other administrations. It was a combat situation and people get killed in combat situations, usually in much larger numbers. We have already had numerous investigations and over twenty five thousand pages of notes about this. The House Republicans are the ones who are always screaming about saving money and there isn’t a more egregious waste of money right now in Washington, with the possible exception of Congressional salaries than the money that will be wasted on another Benghazi investigation. It appears that some of the money wasted on congressional salaries should have been spent to fortify that installation so maybe those four Americans would still be alive today.
So why is this monumental waste of time, money and American attention happening? The answer is obvious… for the Republicans. Not so obvious for the Democrats. With more than two years to go before the 2016 Presidential elections the GOP knows that it is in deep shit. Their two brightest hopes have already crapped out. Chris Christie was dumb enough to let himself get involved in what should have been a minor traffic problem at the GWB and then lazy enough to not cut it off before it ballooned into a national joke with him as the punch line and now the mouth that roared has become the skid mark in the center lane.
Marco Rubio, the great Hispanic hope from Florida who looked like he might be the party’s big chance to hijack the burgeoning Latino vote, was staggered by the hard right of reality, when he let the Tea Party nuts pull immigration, his home run play, right out from under him and then he turned around, still sucking up to the far right and denied the scientific realities of climate change and the inhalable poisoning of the atmosphere. Now he has all the appeal of an intellectually deprived red neck with slightly darker skin.
So there stands the GOP, all but crippled by the Tea Party and Christie’s brain dead assistants, with nothing to look forward to but campaigns by Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Paul Walker, Rick Santorum and more of the same band of idiots that drove them into the ground two years ago against a weakened Barak Obama.
So staggered by this dearth of candidates and facing the juganaught of Hilary Clinton, what do they come up with? Benghazi and Monica Lewinsky. Right now the smart money says that even as I write this Sheldon Addelson or the Koch’s are sending out emissaries to find. “The Dress;” and that if they are successful, it’s an out bet that it will make a public appearance at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
Sure, it’s a pathetic game plan for the election of a president but that’s all the GOP has. Every single program they have backed has either failed miserably, (trickle down economics) or has been aimed at attacking anyone who is actually in immediate need of serious government assistance. The question; how do you win a national election when all your policies are aimed at hurting the majority of voters, lays there in the middle of the swamp that the Republicans call policy and infects anything and anyone that comes near it. So rather than attempt to design some kind of plan that will help the American people, the intellectually bankrupt GOP will fly the flag of the soiled dress and scramble to revive a tragedy that they, by voting not to supply security funding to US embassies all over the world, actually caused themselves.
In typical fashion, the Republican party relies on brain dead pols like Rick Perry to elucidate their policies to the American public. This weekend he spoke out on what he thinks will help employment in this country. Guess what he said.
Tax policies, deregulation, policies that don’t allow for suing and policies that make the public schools teach the wrong stuff. That’s what brain dead Rick thinks will help create jobs. It’s the same old GOP drivel. It’s trickle down economics, a long disproved policy that allows for the billionaires and oligarchs to make more money while the poor starve. It has nothing to do with creating jobs. The idea that saving money for the rich will create job one, is a right wing wet dream, promulgated by the rich to deceive the poor.
The top 1% of the country are already making more money than at any time in history. If this delusion about them creating jobs with their extra profits were true we would now have 100% employment. To send a dim wit like Perry out on national TV to try to make such a feckless point only shows the lack of intelligence of the whole GOP. The only reason why Perry is Governor of Texas is because he is too weak and too stupid to give the oil interests that really run the state any trouble.
Will I Am of the Black Eyed Peas who has created a program to educate ghetto kids in science and the humanities asked a key question this week. Why, he asked, in this country, does an inventor have so much trouble getting a government grant to create a product that will create jobs? Jason Chaffetz R-Ut thought he had answer, but it only turned out to be on the same tired stupid level as all GOP answers. It was all about killing government regulation and cutting business taxes in order to create those jobs. It was the kind of brute stupidity that makes one want to puke.
What the hell happened to the Republican Party?