Essay: "Cleaning Up After Elephants"
Cleaning up after elephants is never pleasant or fun. It doesn't matter if it's at the circus, the zoo or in Washington, D.C., where the intransigent G.O.P. pachyderms are currently gumming up the works in Congress and many apparently don't care if they ruin the economy for nearly everyone in the process. In the nineteenth century cartoonist Thomas Nast (if I remember correctly) came up with the symbol of the Republican elephant. Today, the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party ought to be symbolized as a big horse's rear end. Anyway, before Obama was elected we had eight years of reckless spending, many years of unneeded tax cuts for politically powerful corporations, millionaires and billionaires. Incidentally, thousands of corporations pay zero in taxes, even ones that outsource jobs abroad or set up headquarters in offshore tax shelters. Thanks to George Dubya Bush, his neocon-artist advisors, and the hard right of the Republican Party, and some Democrats in Name Only (DINOs) we have two exorbitant and unnecessary wars (now three exorbitant and unnecessary wars, if you include Lybia). Thanks to the right-wing Congress, and so-called conservative Democrats we have policies of deregulation which led to the housing meltdown, ruthless foreclosures by banks and the like, and the near demolition of the entire economy by reckless Wall Street firms like Enron, AIG, Financial Freedom, and other greedy, self-serving corporations. In addition, the conservative majority in the Roberts Supreme Court passed the ludicrous Citizens United decision to allow corporations and millionaires and billionaires to anonymously donate unlimited funds to candidates who support their interests at the expense of the interests of the Common Man and the rest of us. The extreme right-wing seems to have a three-pronged agenda: give tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy, cut the social safety net and needed government programs to the bone, and to defeat Obama so their pernicious policies and insidious agenda will easily be approved by a conservative Republican President. Unfortunately, Obama is all too willing to compromise (in other words to cave in) with the uncompromising their way or the highway right-wingers. He should know if he makes a deal with the political Devil we all get burnt. I pity Obama. No matter who became President would have a Herculean task of dealing with a post 9/11 world of unnecessary wars, financial meltdowns, and the incompetent, not so bright policies and agenda of an ultra-right-wing President
named George Dubya Bush. Unless, Bush did all this as a ruse to destroy policies which Democrats advocated and instituted.
If the Republicans allow the domestic and perhaps international economy to be obliterated by refusing to raise the debt limit, they better hope and pray that their constituents and non-constituents alike don't take the fourth paragraph of the Declaration of Independence to heart: "...Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends ("Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"), it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government... "It is their Right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." Unfortunately, the extreme right-wing fears the TEA Party, which is perhaps 20% of the electorate tops and their wealthy, elite, heartless and ruthless base , more than their minimal concern for the vast majority of us.
