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You remember those B movies when we were kids, where someone was always getting amnesia? One tap on the head and a guy couldn’t remember what he ate for breakfast that morning. It looks as if someone tapped the Republicans on the head and wiped out their memories of the Bush years. As a public service, we ought to help these guys regain it.
There was another president in charge after Bill Clinton and before Barack Obama and he was a Republican. He presided over Washington for eight years and, in six of those, the GOP was in charge of Congress. When Bush left office, he left us with two wars and a trillion-dollar deficit. Is it all coming back now?
I really felt sorry for poor Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, last week. In his response to the president’s address to Congress, Bobby mentioned how we can’t trust the government to save us in a crisis. He gave, as an example, a heart-wrenching little story about Katrina and inept bureaucrats. The problem is Jindal forgot it was his party that screwed up. I’m not picking on Jindal. He is actually our best hope Sarah Palin doesn’t run for the White House in four years, so I’m hoping he gets his memory back.
The Republicans once threw around tax dollars like Monopoly money to fund what turned out to be the wrong war. Just for good measure, they cut the taxes of the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans in the belief it would actually increase revenue. Then they acted surprised when we sank deeper in debt. Now, with the country facing a depression the likes of which we haven’t seen since Herbert Hoover managed the economy, Republicans are suddenly worried about spending.
To understand the sad state of the Republican Party, you have to realize it still thinks, despite Americans electing him to four terms, Franklin Roosevelt — not George W. Bush — is the worst president in our history. They are still trying to figure out why Hoover got a raw deal in the last Depression, when most folks are being rather silly about focusing on the current one.
The last time Republicans got so angry was when Clinton raised taxes on a small percentage of the wealthiest and wound up with the best economy in our lifetime. If it weren’t for that bad case of amnesia, they would remember that was a time when we actually balanced the budget. You’ve got to give it to the Republicans, though. Not even a master of illusion like David Blaine could have turned a surplus into a trillion-dollar deficit faster than you can say Rush Limbaugh. To be fair, the Republicans would remind us it was for a good cause — Searching for the Lost City of WMDs.
We have been hearing for years how Republicans are for smaller government. It turns out, when they get into the White House, amnesia kicks in and they are as good, if not better, than the Democrats at growing government. The difference between the parties is one of them doesn’t pay for it. Through Reagan and two Bushes, the government has kept growing as the deficits mounted and Reagan and Bush 41 were forced to raise taxes. The lesson learned for today’s Republican Party is, no matter the state of the economy, the solution is to cut taxes for the wealthy. Thus, when George W. Bush found a budget surplus entering office, he cut taxes. Now that we are running a massive deficit and the economy is in the toilet, the Republican Party’s solution is to again cut taxes for the wealthiest among us. The GOP has become the political equivalent of Johnny One Note.
In the last election, the Republican motto was "Country First." Apparently the GOP believes "country" is a synonym for partisan politics. It complains Obama did not include them in the search for a way out of our economic mess, but rules out government action. It pressures Sen. Judd Gregg to withdraw as the nominee for secretary of commerce for partisan reasons. It has decided to sit on the sidelines in the hope the Obama administration’s stimulus plan fails so it can resurrect itself politically, but at what cost to the country?
In those old movies of our youth, the amnesia victim usually recovered their memory after another tap on the noggin. Actually, the Republican Party could do with a swift kick to another part of its anatomy.
