"If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked."
What this piece does not answer is the claimed Democrat incompetence in standing up to the Repug onslaught. Being in the pockets of rich donors does not quite cut it, because the Repugs are in the donors' pockets as well, and they do not mind doing things that many donors find offensive. It hints at a possible explanation when it says that a sensible majority can be effectively held hostage by a lunatic few who do not care about their hostages. In other words, GOP terrorizing America. Interesting.
Wojtek
On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 8:43 AM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Here's an insider yakking about the right. This helped me understand how,
> as the author puts it, "both parties are not rotten in quite the same way."
> I've just clipped the beginning. There's much more at the link:
>
> http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult
>
>
>
>
> Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
>
> Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double
> Indemnity" (1944)
>
> Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two
> political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how
> could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by
> corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to
> raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general
> election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the
> Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in
> is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer
> system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices,
> a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
>
> But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have
> their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs
> and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
>
> To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to
> politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling
> extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full
> of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has
> always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E.
> Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the
> vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential
> candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie
> Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook
> of lunacy.
>
> [...]
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-- Wojtek http://wsokol.blogspot.com/