I am very upset that most Republicans refuse to cooperate with the President Obama’s plan for economic recovery.
The White House under George W. Bush failed to heed the warnings before Sept. 11 and put troops on the Asiatic mainland, going after the Taliban via an invasion instead of sending in a SWAT team to take out al-Qaeda as Obama did in Pakistan. Republicans extended the war into Iraq, by choice, not necessity. They ignored international torture agreements promoted by Rumsfeld and Cheney, supported the renditions, (un-Constitutional internal spying).
They drained the U.S. Treasury by failing to tax America for conducting the wars and further weakened it by providing tax cuts for the super wealthy and by initiating the wasteful use of private contractors at great additional war expenditure instead of using military units for ordinance and security. Most of all, Bush’s White House failed to oversee, initiate and enforce regulations to prevent the bundling of mortgages, the immediate cause of the recession and perhaps a Depression yet to come — all this before Obama.
Yes, we needed a savior! However, instead of cooperating on our recovery as a nation, the Republicans, instead of a mea culpa, opposed the President’s every step. The Republican Senator from Kentucky (Mitch McConnell) made no bones about it. He valued bringing the president down as more important than the needs of the nation. Tea Party supporters pledged higher allegiance to Norquist’s no-tax starve-the-beast policies instead of to America’s common good, and thereby perjured their loyal oath to the Constitution first and foremost.
Instead of apologies from the Republicans for sending this nation hurtling to self-destruction, we received opposition to the most humane aspects of the common good: extending health care, providing jobs for recovery and stopping the neglect of public infrastructure. Currently they threaten those needing help to recover from natural disasters. Private affluence trumps public needs in the Republican scheme of things. It is not socialism to provide by taxation what most citizens individually can’t provide for themselves. We need bridges, we need health care, we need living wages to provide for ourselves — food, clothing and shelter — the basics.
The absolute insensitivity the Republican Party and the Tea Party has toward the needs of the common good — placing political gain over America’s needs — doing all for the corporate good because they pay for reelections instead of the common good, is treasonous to our people, to democracy to our Constitution.
We need anything but a repeat of a Republican president and a Republican congress.
— Marion J. Reis, Wheaton
