REPUBLICAN "DIRTY TRICKS" CONTINUE TO BURY THE "GRAND OLD PARTY"

There´s a good reason that less than 25% of today´s voters call themselves "Republicans".

… A Cartoon of "Town Hall Meeting Disruptions"

It just drives me up the wall when I hear about what the far-right is currently doing by way of their "dirty tricks" and then, someone always says; "Well, both political parties do that kind of stuff."

I understand that both sides do take their shots to increase their political positions, but it sure looks to me that the far right conservatives go way beyond the normal "tricks" that are usually done for establishing their positioning. In fact, the activities of today´s Republican conservative´s "dirty tricks", and their subsequent actions while serving in office and in control of the American government, are seriously beyond anything that could have been envisioned by the forefathers of this great nation.

I mean, let´s look at some of the past obvious areas of the extreme situations when comparing the "right" versus the "left":

>>> President Bill Clinton was savaged and put through an impeachment trial by Republican politicians for lying about having consensual sex in the White House. But, so far, neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney have been put before a trial of their peers for the extreme actions of going into a trumped up, unnecessary war that killed thousands of US troops and Iraqi citizens and cost or squandered trillions of US taxpayer dollars.

>>> The GOP conservatives are hell bent in going after the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Inc. (ACORN) for their alleged illegal activities. This includes their questioned registering of new US Democratic voters. (Which I also agree that an investigation needs to continue being pursued.) But there is nothing currently in process for a past GOP administration that took away long-time personal freedoms such Habeas Corpus. Or the Bush administration´s use of torture and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens…? These are very serious misuses of American executive power.

>>> By controlling both the White House and the Congress for most of the last 20+ years, the GOP had an excellent opportunity for using their controlling position for helping American citizens. This would have been a perfect time for helping to lower the increasing US health care costs or for covering the millions of uninsured Americans. Instead, the conservatives used their position to deregulated government to the point that the US is once again facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

>>> Also over the past 20+ years, the party in control could have done much to deal with the nation´s crumbling infrastructure. This includes the 26% of US bridges that have been declared "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete." Instead, the Republicans that ran the country used their votes to cut the budgets for maintaining all US roads and bridges via their Department of Transportation. (There was no recognition by those in control that the US bridges, back in 1955 that carried 65 million cars and trucks, today have quadrupled for handling 246 million vehicles.)

Now here are some of the latest examples of what I am referring to:

>>> In all the years that the "left" complained about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the GOP, I don´t recall that they had a lobbying organization bus people into American cities and towns. The far left did not do this in order to disrupt the conservative's Town Hall Meetings of the Republican Senators or Representatives. Yet, that is exactly what the GOP and Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks medical and pharmaceutical lobbying company are doing today. These "bused in outsiders" are yelling, screaming and disrupting the latest Town Hall Meetings regarding the discussions of the up-coming health care bills from Democratic Congressional committees. And this is the same former Texas, House representative, Dick Armey, that worked with Fox News to organize the "not-so-successful American Tea Parties". These "parties" are where average middle-class citizens were being "duped" into doing the lobbyist´s own work of protesting the first Obama tax cuts for guess what....their own middle class!

>>> During the Bush II administration, the GOP actively screened the people that attended their meetings and they pre-screened the questions that were given at the president´s press conferences. Due to the recent disruptions of the Democrat´s Town Hall Meetings, these bused in, "non-grass-roots protestors" (that the media calls "Astro-turfers") are forcing future town meeting organizers to consider only allowing those people that live within the Representative´s district to attend the meetings. Democratic Senators may also soon be forced to only allow the residents of their states to attend their meetings, if the disruptions continue by the bused-in, GOP sponsored mobs.

>>> We hear from Republicans today, all the noise about the cost of the proposed Democratic health care plan. Yet, over the last eight years, the previous administration took us into an unnecessary war costing trillions of dollars. Bush never considered worrying about the cost of the wars as he never included the cost in his annual budgets. The GOP has now left the new president to start his first term with a trillion dollar deficit and with "zero plans" as to how the deficit would be paid for going forward. Today, Obama and the Democrats are working on the appropriate "pay-as-you-go" plan for paying for a new health care plan for all US citizens. In addition, as compared to George W. Bush, Obama has put the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into the nation´s budget process.

>>> The GOP has taken credit for passing the bogus Medicare - Plan D prescription bill. (This was also passed with no plan for how they were going to pay for it.) This item is particularly interesting for a number of reasons. First, most of the House members knew it was a bad bill, and it was only passed, in the late wee hours, after the voting had been held open for 3 hours. This is against the long-standing House rule of only holding the voting of a bill open for 15 minutes. The bill was held open by the Republican House Speaker Hastert, in order for the then House GOP leadership (Tom DeLay & Denny Hastert) to "muscle" the votes needed to pass the bill. (FYI: The longest known previous extension of holding a House vote open was 30 minutes in order to allow members that had been caught in a snow storm to get to their seats.)

>>> In addition, as we are all aware, the Republicans continually talk about how they want "free and open markets" with little or no regulations. If that is the case, why did the Republican House pass the Medicare – Plan D prescription bill that does not allow Medicare to negotiate the prices for prescription drugs? Why wasn´t the so called "free market" allowed to rule in order to obtain the very best pricing for prescription drugs for America´s senior citizens? (Both Canada and the UK have "single-payer" health care and they "do" negotiate prices with the drug manufacturers.)

>>> The GOP members of congress have no problem with repeatedly telling bald-face lies every night on the daily broadcast and cable TV news / talk programs. Republican Senator, Judd Gregg (NH), during an interview this week stated that having a "public option" would; "Put a government bureaucrat between the patient and their doctor and there would be rationing of health care such as it is today in Canada and the UK."

That is an absolutely untrue statement about the "public option" currently being discussed in Congress. In addition, neither Canada nor the UK have a rationing issue with their medical coverage and there are many available reports and interviews to support that claim. These comments by Senator Gregg are regularly repeated on TV by other Republican Senators and Congress persons such as; John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Tom Coburn, John Cornyn, Jim DeMint, John Ensign, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, James Inhofe, Richard Lugar, Mel Martinez, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Sessions, Richard Shelby, John Thune, and David Vitter. They obviously have no shame about lying directly to the American public.

Author´s Note:

It´s hard to believe, but many years ago, I actually called myself a Republican. And I am probably a very good example as to why the GOP has continued to shrink over the past two decades.

Barry Goldwater and Dwight David Eisenhower are probably turning over in their graves based on all the Republican lies to the American citizens and to the lack of fiscal responsibility that has been shown by the past administrations of Ronald Reagan and both of the Bush Administrations. The size of government has expanded tremendously under all three of these GOP administrations, and they all left the nation with major fiscal deficits after their terms.

The original GOP was in support of less government, less taxes and a high sense of fiscal responsibility. But since the "Religious Right" hijacked the GOP and the last Bush administration left the country with this major financial crisis, (similar to that of 1929), they also left us with the most permanent American job losses ever. And the GOP´s focus on excessive government deregulation has now brought the country to its knees. In addition, they continue to show total disregard for supporting the American middle class and for the well being of the average, hard working American.

There is no way that I could ever associate my name today with the current organization referred to as the GOP. And based on the latest polls, less than 25% of the voting public today will even identify themselves as being a member of the Republican Party.

As stated in my examples above, there is a very good reason for the current situation within the Republican Party. And what I´ve presented here, barely scratches the surface.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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