Republicans like to rant a lot about big government and constitutional intent and judicial activism, yet, when push comes to shove, most, including those elected to office, don't seem to have a really good grasp of the history of our country, the purpose of government, or the compromise needed in a democracy to govern.
Last week John Boehner was handed an embarrassing moment when he had to enlist the help of Democrats to continue paying the government's bills through April as the Tea Party faction of his caucus was determined to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of government if they didn't get total capitulation on their budget cuts.
Operating from within government, they begin their government service operating under the belief that the government of which they are a part can do no right. Their idea of change is not to improve its function, or make it more efficient. Their only goal is to strip government to the bare bones and leave the economic and social framework of this country unregulated so that the old, largely white power structure, that has ruled this country since its founding, can re-assume a permanent hold on that power.
It is easy to throw rotten fruit when you are out on the outside looking in, but their zealous no-prisoners approach to governance may force Boehner and the other more politically pragmatic Republicans to do business with the Democratic centrists if the Speaker wants to move much major legislation forward. The art of compromise seems to be lost on Mr. Kantor and his friends, and compromise is the keystone of our democracy.
The Tea Party is the political toxic sludge produced by thirty years of cancerous carpetbaggers like Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove's political madrassas where extremist conservative dogma reduces the vision of government to a bogeyman, worse than Jason, Freddie Kruger, and Michael Myers combined.
Atwater was the architect of Reagan's patchwork of extremist special interests, from religious zealots like Pat Roberts to the anti-abortionists to the NRA. He fused the fuel rods of Republican political power by tying these groups together and aligning them with the designs of the GOP givers like the Koch brothers who manipulate government from the shadows. Limbaugh began the reaction on the radio, and Rove was the centrifuge which refined and purified political anti-government rhetoric to feverish levels.
The result is a radioactive group of ambitious political fanatics where ignorance is bliss, and their toxicity spreads further ignorance and social decay.
Tea Baggers speak about the "original intent" of the Constitution, but know little about the document, or the designs of the men who wrote it. Their general grasp of U.S. history is likewise challenged. As Mediaite reported about Michelle Bachmann's visit to New Hampshire last week:
"What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty," the potential GOP presidential candidate said. "You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history."
Ok, the congresswoman was a little off: Recorded history in China goes back more than 12,000 years. Lexington and Concord are in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.
Later she went on to talk about the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, also in Massachusetts, which is factually incorrect. They first landed near the site of modern Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620 before moving to Plymouth and then moved to Plymouth.
Apparently her crack staff isn't big on Google, or reading. Her gaffes though, are not unique to the Tea Party's uneducated view of American history and government.
A survey conducted by the Center for the Constitution last September found that Democrats actually understand the Constitutional limits of government better than the Republicans. In the study it found that Democrats polled 46% to Republicans 30% when asked if they believe that the government's power is limited by the Constitution.
The ultra-Right never did well with the "initial" presidents. FDR, JFK and LBJ put together the New Deal, Social Security, and broke down the walls of segregation. They opened the door for women's rights and much of what we know of modern government today. All along that way, Republicans decried these events as harbingers of doom and destruction. Their more extreme members have long sought to unravel the New Deal, and return to the pre-Great Depression, pre-union days where the captains of industry gleefully exploited workers and the churches did boomtown business in forming the social safety net for anyone willing to be "saved."
Government performs useful functions. In spite of their cries of Socialism, Social Security and Medicare provide a basic safety net for millions of Americans without wealth, education, or power. It does all that without regard to religious practice or social status.
Like all large organizations, government sometimes becomes weighed down with its own rules and regulations, or stumbles in something that it is tasked to do, but on the whole, federal, state, and local government perform vital functions for our collective health, well being, safety, commerce, and comfort which we take for granted.
A Gallup poll, conducted last October, shows that, while Americans have generally negative first reactions to the federal government as a brand or concept, only a minority (18%) want government to limit itself to performing only a few basic functions.
There is this notion, amongst the GOP illiterati, that somehow the government is engaged in for-profit business.
The government, my dear Fox-fed friends, is engaged in the support of the general welfare and in the development and maintenance of very unprofitable or unpopular projects that are needed to promote the general welfare and support commerce. The purpose of government is to take on those functions which are necessary but have no commercial value.
The street that you live on is not profitable. The major street that feeds it is a total loss as well. So are most freeways. Imagine a world where every street was owned and maintained by private enterprise. To go from your home to the market might mean paying of a dozen or more entities to use their roads just to make the trip. Dial 911 and you get a fire truck, policeman, or an ambulance. Hopefully you keep up your 911 policy in the corporatocracy-controlled world that the Tea Party envisions. You can watch your house burn like the guy who didn't pay his 911 bill.
Rick Scott and other GOP govs have been turning President Obama's high speed rail initiative into a political football. Rail systems mean more money for local businesses and open the opportunity to bring in big employers who can network businesses along the rail corridors, just as the highways do for us today, but faster and with less greenhouse gases.
It would be nice if Tea Party irregulars would educate themselves as to the purpose of government. Corporatocracies aren't apt to fill in potholes on your street.
Why, then, push so hard to keep this minority focused on bogeyman government?
Change a law, and the law can be changed back when the political winds shift. Convince a few million people with severe single-issue phobias like gun-toters and bible-thumpers that the whole weight of the government is perpetually against them and you develop generational mistrust and hatred of that government that is politically useful to a handful of very rich and powerful people.
An elderly gentleman at a Boca Raton retirement home told me that he was just "a dumb schmuck from Brooklyn." He added, though:
"You know the difference between people where I come from and all them Tea crazies? I know better than to vote for guys as dumb as me to run stuff."
Yet vote for the know-nothings we did in the last election. Now they look to grind down the wheels of progress to a stand-still. Which is exactly why billionaires like the Koch brothers spent millions to damage and gridlock government. It favors the nearly three decades of Republican rule which has stripped rules and oversight of business that protects the people from the rule by a wealthy few.
My fear is that the legion of ignorant, militant political zombies created over the last thirty years will lead us down the path to disaster, not unlike this classic Star Trek moment:
The daily dumbing by Fox News and the various projects of Karl Rove and his minions is unchecked. They have NPR on the ropes, and big corporations with their own agenda own the rest of the media outlets in this counrty which filter what you hear and see to their own advantage.
The consequences of such metastasizing cancerous ignorance for our democracy may make a future like that of the illiterate Yangs inevitably ours.
My shiny two.