It stays amazing to me how amazed I stay at far-wrong rightists who accuse President Obama of incompetence and who criticize his failed policies and unreached goals as if all these were his fault, when they themselves, with all their unkindly kind, have worked unremittingly to bring about national failure just to retake control of the government in 2013, so as to reinstate and continue their own divisive, destructive, nation-failing methods.
The idea that highly articulate, seemingly educated but mind-bent people can have such deliberate influence on national life stays dumbfoundingly repugnant to me. That they would willfully subvert real democracy in favor of aristocratic wishfullness, pressing toward a corporate oligarchy on the National Socialist model chills my heart and churns my stomach. Oh, they will say: You accuse us of Nazism? Yes. Socialism for the rich and powerful excludes everyone else. Not even social graces for them. Instead, they get only laissez-faire unfairness and almost insuperable obstacles that personal merit and initiative can rarely overcome even through terrible difficulty.
With dissolution of the middle class, common folks become a mixture of (1) depressed and expropriated slaves stuck with bare survival wage or on the dole, and (2) technicians trained to serve, who lick up to the power players in exchange for a few comforts, priviledges and benefits. The goal of the too-far right and Tea Party types seems to be a split society of born winners and losers with very little upward mobility but easy downfall. Hard work? The rich will say “Do it for me!” The poor will say “Pay me?” The answer will be “You have no contract, I’ll give you whatever I feel like, whenever I care to. You have no witness to anything verbally agreed or implied. You have no appeal. I don’t have to treat you ethically, you’re beneath my notice. Get out of line, try to unite, I’ll call the SWAT team on you. I’m a real person, you’re an animal.”
With outlook like that, how would anyone expect honesty or decent behavior from a corporatist Republican? We should expect exactly the rotten actions we see and read about every day: lying, spinning, tilting, cheating, misframing, misconstruing, smoke-screening, falsifying and obfuscating; telling only partial truths which benefit none but themselves; abusing statistics, warping and reversing definitions. Being as despicable as possible without getting sent straight to jail, or when caught, often as not, buying their way out, shifting blame and diverting attention. Accusing opponents of their own guilt.
If the “Get Money Out of Politics” and “Reform Wall Street” movements fail to turn this country around in the coming year, I will lose faith in the United States and submit with old age to an unhappy end and meaningless death. Do I overdramatize? At eighty years of age, I have lived through a number of losses, personal and national. Perhaps, like an old sailor whose ship has gone down from under him, I will succumb quietly to mere hypothermia, not feeling the sharks take my feet.
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