Things I Hate – I

Rancid Republicans

I have tried to be open-minded all my life, considering my purpose both personally and professionally to seek the truth and disseminate it—recognizing that truth is best achieved through intellectuall give and take.

What a maroon I was.

There is nothing good to be said about anyone in public life who identifies himself or herself as a Republican. And very little good to be said about any Republican in private life, either, with the possible exception of those who are Republican out of family tradition. But don’t expect a professional Republican admit thinking anything through.

They are vile, lying hypocrites who would rather see people die in war, from starvation and from bankruptcy-induced suicide rather than concede that sometimes government owes us a little something from our taxes.

Am I overheated? You bet I am, and I will simply have to stop watching and listening to C-SPAN.

We have an economic crisis of historic magnitude. I don’t know the right answer, and President Obama say he doesn’t know his plan will work. But what do Republicans know? They know they get their jollies from marching in lockstep, opposing everything and anything the congressional and White House Democrats propose while offering nothing of their own as an alternative.

Well, they deny it, saying “Yes, must do something, but not this bill.” Their answer when it isn’t “no” is, “Cut it in half.” I say if my house is burning down and all I have to fight it is the water in the pond next door that I will need for the next year for drinking, cooking and bathing, then I will not be parceling out the contents of the pail. I will dump the whole pond on the house, and so would you. Water IS available somewhere, at some cost, but right now my house is burning down.

I used to look deeply at Republican arguments on all kinds of measures that were before Congress. Sometimes, they had a point and sometimes Democrats would be too reflexive. But never before have I seen one party uniformly, down to the laces of their jack boots, think alike on a bill so complex and important. The only time parliaments or voters act like this is under Soviet- or Nazi-style dictatorships.

These poor stinking mackerels are so afraid of having the real nutjobs on the Right defeat them in primaries they would rather lose a general election to a liberal. Which is what is going to happen in 2010, by the fish-crate load.

Sure, every side in a political fight has talking points, but the Republican ones are paid for by industry, trumpeted by the Limburgers of talk radio, and found to be thorough lies. Speaking of Rush Limburger, he says $10 billion in the bill for the National Institutes of Health is a boondoggle. He should know better. Aside from creating jobs instantly in a field he knows nothing about—academia—and aside from leading to potential disease cures, apparently the big problem for him is that his drug-addiction wouldn’t have been possible without medical research.

Then there is the bizarre, Goebbelsian, stunner that the bill has a secret provision that would force your doctor, at your bedside, to check with a government “bureaucrat” before he or she could make a decision on whether you should live or die.

The reality is that there is money for research and development of a concept known as “comparative evaluation research,” which is what corporate and small-business America does every day. You look at a problem, do research to find the most effective solution and then apply it. Doing this in medicine, of course, would help a doctor sift through treatment options to find out which one is most appropriate and at what cost in terms of side effects and probability of success.

It exists now. There is a whole (underfunded) government agency devoted to this – and proscribed by Congress, captive of the medical and pharmaceutical industries, from establishing any guidelines. It was such a good idea that some years ago a government position was created to encourage and oversee “comparative evaluation research.” The person who created the position? Well his middle initial was W.

Then there is the statement by some blusterflub in the Republican party whose bleat I did not recognize on the radio that the bill provides $50 million for the arts and nothing for small business. NOTHING FOR SMALL BUSINESS? The bill spends about $800 billion. Most of the businesses that will benefit, as are almost all businesses in the United States, are small! Oh, and artists like to work, too, even though all 5 million of them contribute nothing to the economy.

Then there is the congresswoman who looks like your school’s lunch lady but has an IQ less than that of mystery meat. This would be Candice Miller of Michigan, a Republican of course, who denounces mass transit, the most basic of stimulus items, as “waste” while at the same time demanding that those wastrels in the House and Senate majority take a new look at the bill and ADD NINE BILLION DOLLARS – in giveaways to the auto industry. Did I mention she is from Michigan, and most likely an ex-congresswoman?

She probably hates whoever it was who lied on the floor of the House today that the bill gives “news cars to bureaucrats.” This may be a reference to an accelerated schedule of replacing government fleet cars—which have to come from somewhere. (Psst, Congressman Oilpan, those cars might even come from Detroit.

In short, these baloney peddlers, unable to get their tiny minds around the fact that the American people want the Obama-Pelosi-Reid solution, can resort only to name-calling, picayune pot-shotting at legitimate small pieces of the recovery bill and, really, insanity. (see Rep. Pete Sessions, Dallas Republican, who compares his party to the Taliban.)

These foul filthy flibbertyjibbets known as Republicans don’t even play the nasty game of politics right. Before their leaders got the word from Limburger, the de facto chairman of the Republican party, some of them walked into bipartisan negotiations, won some concessions and then turned around the voted against the bill and their own demands.

There is only one person I know well who kind of admits to being a Republican. So maybe I am not getting a broader more nuanced view. But I have no interest anymore in trying to understand, anymore than I want to understand the squirrels who eat my tulip bulbs. At least squirrels are reasonably cute.

Their vermin cousin Republicans are not cute. They are dangerous to America and ought to be exterminated from public life—at the voting booths, if we can be sure they haven’t rigged them again.

Dumb Democrats

I think Kennedys should stop breeding.

Two of the most stupid, harmful, Democrats I know are the sons (the ones who haven’t killed themselves yet) of Robert F. Kennedy. One is his namesake, RFK Jr., who has made a career of charging the federal government with running a conspiracy to create autism and cover up evidence that thimerosol in MMR vaccine has no connection with the condition.

Every, EVERY, reputable scientific body has found no evidence of such a connection, and yesterday three special mastery courts ruled against parents making such claims and in such a manner as to refute any further possibility that science is wrong.

They did so on Darwin’s birthday, which reminds me of Joe Kennedy, III, as possible refutation that some men completed descending from the apes. I worked for a Democratic congressman at the time young Joe was a member. He was universally thought of as the dumbest Democrat in the House.

You have seen him if you watch cable TV, the nice curly haired guy with a Boston accent helping old people get heating oil and avoid freezing to death. Courtesy, he notes, “of the people of Venezuela.”

Don’t buy it. “The people of Venezuela” he is thanking numbers exactly one. Dictator Hugo Chavez, who owns Citgo and who most recently has been heard whipping up his population to boycott, harass and yes, attack, Jews.

Way to go, Joe! Your Nazi-loving namesake must be goose-stepping in his grave.