Taking their medicine

Why the GOP is scared

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/medicine.htm
5/8/07

It’s being noted around that the Republican candidates, with the exception of Mittens Romney, just aren’t performing up to expectations as far as fund raising goes. Reporters are questioning if McCain is actually even trying to raise every penny he can, and while they excuse it based on his “distaste” for fund raising (boy, is HE in the wrong racket!), the fact is that he probably isn’t trying as hard as he could.

His reasons are his own, of course, but I can’t help but think that he’s concluded what poll after poll has shown: next year is going to be an electoral blowout. If Iraq is still at a full boil with Americans getting killed every day, and the economy is as bad or worse for working people as it is now, then not only would just about any Democrat beat any Republican running for president (and recent polls show Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Obama all leading the top GOP candidates, Guiliani and McCain), but there could be an electoral massacre in the House of 1932 proportions. The Dems could even end up with a super majority in the Senate.

Even if by some miracle he DID win, would he really want to face a Democratic Congress with veto-proof majorities in both chambers? McCain might be crazy, but he’s not stupid.

People point to the occupation of Iraq as a reason for the party’s unpopularity, but that actually presents itself in those stellar 28% approval ratings that Putsch is racking up. And while all ten of the little people running for the office profess “support for our brave troops,” McCain is the only one who has let the occupation become an albatross around his neck. All the others might vow to stay the course, but McCain is the only one easily identified as being associated with the quagmire.

The general loathing Americans have for Putsch is a drag on the party, to be sure, but Putsch isn’t running in ‘08, and it’s a pretty good bet that few, if any GOP candidates for any office are going to want their picture taken with him. Putsch’s role in the ‘08 campaign seems destined to be that of the crazy aunt up in the attic, the one who supposedly ran off to Tibet with a door to door salesman back in 1954.

The real reason the GOP has to be scared is because the people they’ve been using for the past few years for a base — the religious zanies and the so-called “Reagan Democrats” — have woken up and smelled the coffee. For years, the GOP has been convincing them that their own best interests lay with letting industry increase productivity (“productivity” is the polite way of saying “cheap labor and high profits”) and that as business boomed, the rising tide would lift all boats. The working class supporters of the GOP just now realized that they aren’t on those boats. They’re the guys on the beach, trying to stop the tide from washing away their sandcastles. And there isn’t a single tax-and-spend Democrat in sight they can blame for that.

The religious zanies are beginning to realize that maybe turning their faith into another political party wasn’t such a good idea. There have been some moans from the Christian right about how aggressive atheists have become, and how they are even attacking the tenets of Christian belief. They can’t believe atheists would act that way, just because the religious right spent the past 40 years being aggressive and attacking atheism at every opportunity. What’s worse, even fellow Christians who believed America was meant to be a secular nation were acting the same way! Nobody was supposed to shoot BACK when they had Jesus pick up their ideological submachine gun!

The allies and biggest beneficiaries of the GOP policies are the corporate rich, and right now they aren’t helping matters. They’ve been given free rein to rape the American population and make off with the proceeds, and Republican pleas – if any – for them to chrissakes cool it for a while, at least until after the election, don’t seem to be helping. Put it this way: you can toss a bunch of steaming, raw meat to a pack of hungry wolves, and you have the right to ask them to chew each bite six times before swallowing. Just don’t embarrass yourself by pretending to be surprised by the results.

Bought gas lately? Regular is $3.60 up here. The rest of the country isn’t far behind, averaging $3.07 a gallon.

But here’s the kicker. The refineries are running well below capacity. A report today says that they are running at 89% capacity. And oil, which was at $75/barrel immediately after Katrina, is at about $60 a barrel now. No shortages, and demand is well below supply. Yet the prices are up.

We’re being Enroned. And if the Republicans are hoping that the electorate has short memories and will have forgotten the thrill of $4 gasoline by the time the primaries roll around, it’s worth noting that the oil company profit reports for this summer will be coming out the week before the New Hampshire primary, and will remind everyone of why they couldn’t take their summer vacation this year. Just savor what you sacrificed so Exxon’s CEO could waddle off with a $450 million golden parachute and never have to work again – not that he ever did, of course.

It’s percolating into the public consciousness that the housing crash isn’t just some remote event that annoys bankers in Europe like the falling dollar does, but is something that is hitting their friends, neighbors and families. Over two million people have lost their homes so far, and it’s only going to get worse. Republicans might reconsider mentioning how good blind market forces are for the average working stiff, for the time being.

GOP twaddle about free trade isn’t going to help much. Most everyone knows someone whose cat died recently, and everyone is looking at China, which has the ultimate unregulated industry, one which puts melamine in gluten in order to artificially boost the amount of protein detected, in order to raise prices. Just that free market looking out for the consumer, is all.

Now it’s coming to light that China has, with frightening success, managed to conceal the fact that they killed thousands of people, mostly children, both in China, and in other parts of Asia and Africa. Seems they have a cottage industry in knock-off drugs. You can get a bottle of fake Robitussin for 25 cents. A sweet deal, you say?

Well, the sweet part is that where reputable cough syrup makers use glycerine to sweeten their products, the gangsters in the Chinese underground market were using ethylene glycol. As Mary Poppins might have sung, “just a spoonful of antifreeze makes the medicine go down, the medicine go down, the medicine go down.” The only trouble is your child’s kidneys go down with it, followed shortly by her central nervous system.

Great advert for the free market, isn’t it?

And speaking of medicine, as public fury grows over GOP refusals to even consider revamping the ruinous policies that have made America’s health care system one of the worst in the developed world, Michael Moore has a new movie coming out, “Sicko”. It compares the US medical system to those of Canada and Cuba. I hear America’s doesn’t come off too well.

As all this seeps into the public consciousness, the GOP may learn that Iraq, politically destructive as it is, may just be the least of their problems.