One of the most disgusting themes from the Republican Convention was the idea that the Republicans had been really excited and optimistic about the Obama Presidency at first, but now they are disappointed and disillusioned and think that ‘firing’ the President is warranted and necessary to get the country back on track. They wanted Obama to succeed, but he let them down, they say. Romney said in his speech, “Four years ago, I know that many Americans felt a fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president. That president was not the choice of our party but Americans always come together after elections.” And, later he said, “I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed.” Toward the end of his speech he said, “America has been patient. Americans have supported this president in good faith.” He expects us to believe what he says. They always think we’ll believe them.
They think we’ve forgotten. They think we weren’t paying attention. They think we didn’t see the billboards questioning our President’s citizenship. They think we’ve forgotten their shouts of ‘Death Panels!’ They think we didn’t notice their perpetual filibuster or their brinksmanship over the debt ceiling. They think we’ve forgotten that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” They think they can rewrite history, and not just ancient history, but the history of the past four years. They can tell us that after the election we all ‘came together’ and were ‘patient’ and ‘supported the president in good faith’. They think if they tell us this we’ll believe it. They think we’re stupid.
It is also obvious that the Republicans are engaged in politics to maximize their own personal interests. They believe in a sort of ‘market-based’ politics where all actors are expected to self-promote and advocate aggressively for their own interests in competition with other interest groups in the country. So, as the business owners, they advocate aggressively for lower corporate taxes. They attack public sector unions in order to weaken unions in general. Their attacks are a ‘two-fer’; they affect public budgets AND they weaken the labor movement with whom they struggle in their businesses. They are tied to the Oil and Gas Industry, so they aggressively champion drilling and oppose the regulations which try to limit the environmental impact of oil dependence. They don’t mind the pollution which poisons OTHER PEOPLE’S property; they are out to maximize their benefits. What happens downstream is not their concern. They don’t care about ‘global warming’, they already have air-conditioners in their houses.
The combination of these two characteristics, a belief in the gullibility of the public and a die-hard pursuit of personal interests over national ones, is especially dangerous and damaging. If they regain power, they will again plunder the public finances, thinking as Cheney did in 2005 “We won the midterms, this is our due.” Is it a coincidence that the Iraq war, with its missing ‘pallets of cash’, was also an experiment in the use of ‘outside contractors’ like Halliburton and Blackwater? Is it a coincidence that the unfunded Medicate Part D also contained a provision that barred the government from using their market power to negotiate drug prices? Is it a coincidence that the Bush Administration’s Minerals Management Service, a branch of Interior Department charged with monitoring oil company leases of public lands, was caught snorting speed from office toaster ovens in a wild party with the people they were supposed to be regulating?
No, it isn’t a coincidence. They are in this for their own personal gain and they think we are too stupid to care. They think we will hear their lies and believe them. If they win, even by the tiniest margin, they will think they again have a ‘mandate’ to rape and pillage. But, they will not consider it ‘forcible rape’; they will conclude that ‘we asked for it’.