October 15, 2006 02:11 pm
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Did you see it start? Are you watching carefully? It happened so quickly and stealthily that you might have missed it. That is, at least until you arrived at your nearest gasoline station during the last few weeks. What was “it” you ask? It was nothing short of the start of the Republican attempt to buy off the electorate in time for the November referendum on their control of all three branches of government and the worst mismanagement of America since the Hoover administration.
In case you have been too afraid to start your SUV and venture down the road for fear of having to make the difficult decision between pumping up former Exxon Mobil CEO Lee Raymond’s $90 million pension plan and feeding the kids, I have good news for you. Believe it or not, gasoline prices are down nearly 33 percent. And, venturing a jaded guess, I’ll bet you that next loaf of bread gasoline prices continue to go down in time for the coming election. Why? Because the Republicans are desperate to retain control of all three branches of government at the federal, state and local levels so they can go on restructuring America to their status-quo liking.
Karl Rove and his no-holds-barred, ultra-conservative electioneering sycophants are praying that the only thing you’re watching is the price at the gasoline pump before you walk into the voting booth. (Let’s not even get into the former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley thing — but watch your kids anyway.) Gas company executives, Republicans all, think you’re stupid and they’ve made you desperate enough that a few cents a gallon conceded for a couple of months up to the election will enable Republicans to retain Congress and then go right on about their business ripping you off.
However, before you vote, if you take a long, hard look at the American economic, social and moral landscape as it has been remade in the image of Bush the Second under the direction of Vice Emperor Cheney, Consul Frist and the former Prefect DeLay, you will see how they have savagely raided the treasury for the benefit of their military-industrial business buddies at the expense of your great-great-great-grandchildren.
As in the waning days of the Roman Empire, the current gang of aristocrats running both houses of Congress has fundamentally restructured tax and civil law to ensure that anyone but themselves pays the bills of government or bears the burdens and losses in military service; their personal fortunes create enormous dynastic wealth that will be untaxed and control land and government in perpetuity; wages are kept low, and benefits and pensions are reduced or eliminated; privacy and freedom of the press and speech are curtailed and controlled; and they are insulated from harm caused by the terrorism of the new class of Islamic vandals and barbarians at the gates of this, the modern Roman Empire.
Do I sound like a knee-jerk, tax-and-spend liberal, the second cousin to Howard Dean? Not on your life! I am a card-carrying Republican and have been since I started voting many an election season ago. I cast my first presidential vote for Gerald Ford. I voted for President Reagan although I now realize it was President Carter who was right about nuclear proliferation, alternative energy and America’s dependence on Arab oil. I am a confirmed capitalist and while I attended Brite Divinity School my mostly liberal colleagues and professors referred to me as “the token conservative.”
What has caused me to cross the chasm over to the “dark” side? It is basically the hijacking of the Republican Party by ruthless and cruel executives who pretend to be statesmen but whose interests are only wealth, power and control. At the state level, Bush’s political protégé, Rick Perry, is in the pockets of the insurance, banking, real estate, transportation and utilities industries and never met a special interest group whose money wasn’t good enough for him. On the federal level, Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Frist and now Denny Hastert, consistently seek only that which benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else and feign compassion for the average working class Joe and Jane.
I, like everyone else, was bamboozled into initially supporting military action in Iraq with the now-thoroughly discredited pretense of Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. I see it for what it was now: the personal vendetta of the man who would be emperor to avenge a death threat against his father, the former first citizen of this latter-day empire. But even that wasn’t enough to convince me that everything Bush and Cheney have done is anti-selective against the ordinary American citizen in favor of their rich buddies. What thoroughly horrified and offended me (and still does) is the gross and immoral indifference towards and ruthless intransigence against helping, indeed, rescuing the residents of New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast region from a natural disaster unparalleled in American history.
The Bush administration has spent nearly one-half trillion dollars occupying two countries on the other side of the planet (or do they consider it the periphery of the Imperial land holdings?) at the cost of nearly 3,000 dead and 25,000 wounded of our nation’s best and bravest. And there is no end in sight to this. But right here, next to Texas, more than 1,800 people were killed as a result of Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands injured and upwards of 800,000 people left homeless, empty-handed and displaced. What have Bush and the Republicans done for Katrina and Rita victims? In short, as little as possible and far less than what they’ve spent on the war. And therein lies the crux of the issue.
To me, it is not that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former FEMA Director Mike Brown are incompetent beneficiaries of Tammany Hall-style political patronage. It is that black, brown, average and poor people simply don’t matter. We are irrelevancies in the Republican mindset. Bush’s wealthy white real estate developer buddies even now encircle New Orleans like sharks in the post-Katrina flotsam waiting to begin a carpet-bagging land grab against bankrupt, poverty-level homeowners abandoned by Bush’s insurance company buddies who claim water, not hurricane winds, destroyed everything. Rebuilding the Superdome as a showcase so that New Orleanians can have their gladiators and circuses is grossly insulting to them and the average American.
The Constitution that I studied suggests that among government’s enumerated responsibilities is to provide for the general welfare of American citizens. Not the general welfare of Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians or any other people, but for our citizens first! The Bush administration has demonstrated that globalization of America’s mega-companies and the interest of their executives is its first concern. The Bush administration’s liberal distribution of American taxpayer dollars to supposedly sow democracy everywhere in the world at the expense of the needs of desperate and destitute ordinary Americans, especially those whose lives were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina informs me that contemporary Republicanism is out-of-step and incapable to meet the first task of our Constitution’s imperative. American domestic and foreign policy is in Hoover-style shambles and there is no leadership in sight from the Republicans.
Under Bushonomics, unless you are among the fortunate 10 percent of Americans who control 71 percent of the accumulated wealth and income in this country, you simply do not matter. I do not happen to be anywhere close to receiving an invitation to that lofty social milieu, thus, I don’t matter either. However, I’m sick and tired of watching the super-wealthy develop a greater and more impenetrable aristocracy than that which existed in pre-revolutionary France or during the pinnacle of the Roman Empire.
I read a great deal of history. History is a window into the intergenerational soul of humanity. My favorite figure from history, Winston Churchill, who was instrumental in saving Western civilization from the Nazis (and whose wisdom in dealing with that threat should be studied and followed in this age of Islamofacists,) “crossed the floor,” that is, switched parties in the House of Commons in 1904. Churchill, born to privilege as the scion of a duke, nevertheless had a keenly developed sense of equity and fair play and joined the Liberal Party to support, among other ethically, morally and socially responsible positions, a meaningful minimum wage, unemployment insurance and health benefits for the salaried working class, especially British coal miners. He heaped scorn upon aristocratic insouciance towards those who worked for the landed gentry, the House of Lords.
But Bush, Cheney and the other rich governmental executives couldn’t hold a candle to Churchill’s conscience. I am ashamed to say I cast a vote for any of them. I have “crossed the floor” too and forsaken the Republican Party in its present form because it has abandoned the social, ethical, moral, civil and spiritual high ground it once held. I believe in a republic of opportunity for all, not an aristocracy of some. I will be deceived no more by present Republican leaders. Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh can save their rhetoric for someone else. All that these powerful people have done is promote policies and laws to benefit those who are already blessed beyond their rightful due and have created the conditions of a fashionable new feudalism. This November, I hope to see this caricature of republicanism swept from power nationwide and new leadership reverse the damage done during the last six years. I’ll vote Republican again when Republicans again deserve my vote.
Matthew H. Snider
is a Cleburne resident
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