Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Political Failures – Part 3
Audio Transcripts
07/25/07
[Start Program]
(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)
Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.
Well for the past two weeks I’ve been going over the list of political failures from the whole lot up in Washington. We’re halfway through this four-part miniseries now, with Part 1 dealing with the failures of the White House, specifically under George W. Bush, and with Part 2 dealing with the Democrats in Congress… specifically in the last six or seven months, but also pretty much hammering in a few things they’ve done or not done in recent years.
Now we’re into Part 3… and now we get to focus on the failings of the REPUBLICANS in Congress.
But before we do that, I have two important disclaimers that I need to get out of the way.
First, as I’ve been mentioning since I started this little miniseries on political failures, I’m not favoring either the Democrats or the Republicans here, because as far as this commentator is concerned they have ALL failed the American people. Liberals or Conservatives, it really doesn’t matter, they are ALL guilty of letting the American people down in their own unique ways.
Second, AS a disclaimer of sorts, I do have to admit that once upon a time I WAS an actual, card-carrying member of the Republican Party. But that was back in the days when the White House was inhabited by a completely DIFFERENT man named Bush, and my reasons for leaving that party had less to do with what was going on in that White House at the time and more to do with what that party was representing at the time… and for the most part still represent today.
And the reason why I’ve separated the failures of the Republican-controlled White House from the failures of the Republicans in Congress is because they each had their own unique failures, and it’s a little hard to crucify the White House for something that isn’t even under their authority to remedy according to the US Constitution. Yeah, you remember that little document, right? The one that our current president allegedly said was just a “goddammed piece of paper”.
Anyway, back to Congress and to the party of the bloated elephant.
I’m going to start by giving the GOP members of Congress a compliment. Actually I gave this to them last week in Part 2 of this mini-series, but it is worth repeating here.
In the past seven months that the GOP has been the MINORITY party in Congress, they have managed to do what the Democrats could not for the past twelve years of GOP dominance. They have managed to keep their act together and stymie the whole legislative process!
The Dems thought that they could take impeachment out of the discussion and simply get away with empty votes of no-confidence or some non-binding resolutions criticizing the Bush Imperium. The Republicans said no to that. They held the Dems to their part of the bargain with giving the Bush Imperium their latest blank check to fund the Iraq War, and then they screwed over the Dems when it came to supporting their sham of a comprehensive immigration reform bill. I mean, you have to give it to them… they stood their ground these past few months even as the President was out there challenging their patriotism.
It makes you wonder, then, where that spirit of rebellion was during the first six years of the Bush Imperium!
Now I’m sure that many of you will think that the GOP’s abandonment of their advertised principles of limited government and supporting individual freedom are serious political failures for them… and once upon a time I believed that as well. I used to think during the 1980’s that they somehow strayed from their path. But in truth, what these things represent is merely false advertising. They KNOW who their core supporters are. They KNOW who and what their base represents and they certainly KNOW what their agenda is. That is the REASON why I left the GOP for the Libertarian Party in the first place! It’s not that they didn’t get the message… I was the one who didn’t get the message… and the message is that these little buzzwords of freedom and limited government that they like to throw about are just that: empty convenient buzzwords. They’re really not failures… they’re just marketing. Or as Donald Trump likes to call it: “branding”.
But here ARE a few political failures of the GOP in recent years.
First of all, without a shadow of doubt, the passage of the Anti-American PATIROT Act, THE single most destructive legislative act and constitutional crime committed by Congress since the Alien and Sedition Acts... overshadowing even the Communications Decency Act… was not only passed by the GOP-ruled Congress, but it was done SIGHT UNSEEN! It wasn’t even put to PAPER and they passed it anyway! That was a HUGE political FAILURE for the American people!
And it’s not that they should have done nothing… because they were being goaded into action on a level that was paramount to having a gun put to their heads… but at the very least they should have waited that extra day or two for the frigging thing to actually come out on PAPER before putting it to vote. It’s bad enough that these guys never do read these bills in the first place, never mind have an ACTUAL reason for not reading them!
And then when it came time to renew certain elements of this law, well they may have expressed their concerns about it, but they didn’t really DO too much to address them! That’s the thing… THESE were the people who had the power to make the CHANGES that they were complaining needed to be made… and for the most part they didn’t. In that regard, they were negligent in their responsibilities as lawmakers to the American people.
That seemed to have been a common theme for the GOP-ruled Congress… in a position to do the right thing, but never really following through.
The whole issue with wasteful budget spending was yet another failure for the GOP-ruled Congress. Sure the great “budget surplus” was going to go away. That was a GIVEN! The people who REALLY KNEW how that surplus came about – including yours truly – were the ones telling people that it wasn’t going to last. It wasn’t going to last because Wall Street – the TRUE source of that surplus – was no long undergoing that roller coaster period of repeated record gains and repeated record losses. But Congress was quick to spend that money anyway. THESE were the guys in the position to keep spending down… and they didn’t!
And yes, the “War on Terror” - or the “War on Islamic Bad Guys” or whatever you want to call it - did not help matters much. But Congress didn’t stop wasting money! In fact some of these losers were bitching and crying and throwing temper tantrums on the legislative floor when their personal pork programs – like the Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere” championed by Senator Ted Stevens – were being considered for elimination.
These are the guys who are supposed to be about fiscal responsibility and yet they’re giving money away like there’s no tomorrow. These are the guy who came up with budget earmarks… items inserted into the federal budget without any kind of vote or discussion about them. And then you turn around and expect fiscal accountability from the corporate world? These guys were NO DIFFERENT than the crooks at Enron!
No, wait, I take that back… they were WORSE than the crooks at Enron, because at least we could PROSECUTE the crooks at Enron! We could hold them accountable and send them to prison and take away their cushy homes. Or at least the ones who didn’t die before going to prison. We can’t do that to members of Congress. Even after we kick them out of office for screwing us over we still have to pay for their pensions.
If the Bush tax cuts were such a great thing for the economy, why didn’t the GOP-ruled Congress make them permanent? Why did they continue to put in an expiration date?
Well I know the reason why: because they wanted to hold that over the voters. “Vote for us or the taxes will go up!” And then when the tax cuts expire… which will start to happen soon… and the economy goes down the toilet… which I’ve been warning you folks will happen… you guys get to blame the Democrats for something that they, for once, did not actually do! But you’ll blame the Dems anyway. In fact, the neocon marching orders are to do precisely THAT. I’ve already HEARD people chanting that specific neocon mantra.
I mean, the Machiavellian manipulation here is absolutely diabolical!
Speaking of marching orders… one of the lesser political failures has GOT to be when the Republicans in Congress actually parrot each other using the same talking points over and over and over again. If the catchphrase of the day is “this is nothing more than a cheap stunt”, then you’ll have at least ten Republicans get in front of the podium and use that exact catchphrase WORD-FOR-WORD!
Here’s a quick little piece of advice for all you Republicans out there… when Jon Stewart can catch your little parrot acts and then air them on his nightly show on Comedy Central on a regular basis, then you’ve pretty much lost your credibility. So either get some better speechwriters, or just let Karl Rove do all of your talking for you since he’s already pretty much writing your speeches anyway.
The Republicans’ repeated inability to pass budgets ON TIME has got to be a key failure. If any of these Republicans were in charge of a private business and they pulled the kind of stunt they were doing in Congress, they would be in violation of their own damned Sarbanes-Oxley law. Get this into your heads: the DEADLINE for getting the budget passed is October 1st. That means it has to be PASSED and signed into law by then! It is NOT January 1st or February 1st or whenever you feel like it if at all. It is October ONE!
And what was that crap about not even BOTHERING to finish your job this past December? You left rest of the budget-passing job to the Democrats and then actually had the audacity to BITCH about them “dragging their butts”! Guess what… if the Democrats don’t bring that up in their next elections… I WILL, because that is just a sign of GROSS incompetence and negligence! Every single Republican should be ASHAMED of that kind of incompetence! That kind of action in the private sector usually results in lawsuits.
But perhaps THE BIGGEST political failure on the GOP’s record to date is their atmosphere of corruption and graft that was generated in the Congress.
You have the House Majority Leader dictating to the lobbyists on K-Street whom they will hire. You have a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff who gets caught up in some bad stuff and his connections to the GOP hierarchy start to bring a bunch of other people down. You have Bob Ney and Randy Cunningham getting caught in bribery. You have a so-called “family values” champion by the name of Mark Foley resurrecting the 1983 Congressional page scandal and the hierarchy of the House of Representatives bending over backwards to wash their hands of any knowledge of his actions.
And then there is Tom DeLay, Abramoff’s buddy, that same majority leader who bullied K-Street, who catered to the religious extremists in 2005 by turning the local fiasco over Terri Schiavo into a national three-ring circus. The one who helped to manipulate the state legislature so he could have more Texas Republicans in Congress. The same career politician that, when facing an indictment for violating a state campaign law, actually tried to have the ethics rules changed so he could keep his power after being indicted. Ironically it was the SAME ethics rule that was created by the GOP when they first took over the Congress in 1995! THAT Tom DeLay!
Now fortunately DeLay and the rest of his ethically-challenged cohorts are out of office, but let’s get brutally honest here… their actions are and will continue to serve as an indelible STAIN on the whole GOP at least for the short-term and quite possibly for the next few elections. And rightly so! This was the party that came in with promises of fixing the problems of this system, and instead they became the problem.
The Republicans DESERVED to lose in 2006! They actually EARNED that loss through their actions, their arrogance, their elitism, and through their incompetence. They were the ones that set the bar. They were the ones that declared themselves the champions of ethics and morality, and they have nobody but themselves to blame when they failed to measure up to it.
They didn’t just fail the American people, they failed themselves!
And before they can even try to get back even a modicum of additional power, they need to get their act together. They need to go back to those small towns and those small communities that still erroneously believe in those clever empty buzzwords of limited government and individual freedom and personal responsibility. They need to remember what they were selling those people, and they need to actually consider that maybe… just maybe… they should do more than just treat these things as buzzwords.
(Computer – some stuff)
(Fade Music In – “Who am I” by Peace Orchestra)
Well that’s Part 3 of this four-part miniseries on political failures. I’ll be wrapping this whole thing up next week with Part 4.
But the question is… do you know which group that will be? I gave you guys a serious hint about it in Part 2.
Head on over to the blog page at http://d2brutallyhonest.blogspot.com and let me know what your guess is by leaving a comment in the transcript to tonight’s rant.
(Pause)
Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!
(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)
[End of program]
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