(Wash., DC) The results of eight
years of Bush-Cheney at the helm make the demise of the Republican
Party an easy call. Our financial system is on life support. The
major banks are insolvent, according to banking and legal authority
William K. Black. If they're not, they're in intensive care. No
matter how many trillions of dollars worth of infusions they receive,
they're not making loans. The economy is in a free fall with growth
down 6% a quarter and job losses running at nearly 600,000 a month.
We're stuck in two catastrophic wars. Despite President Obama's
election, we're viewed with suspicion and disregard throughout the
world.
The
public knows which party bears the primary blame for all of this and
they're not about to forget any time soon. The Republican Party is
headed for the political graveyard.
They're
not going to rely on past achievements though. Through their
self-proclaimed national leader, the odious Rush Limbaugh, they've
chosen to attack the first Latino nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge
Sonia Sotomayor, for being a "racist." Former Oxycontin addict Limbaugh said,
"She brings a form of bigotry and racism to the court." He went on to
say that nominating her was like nominating Klansman and Aryan Nation
advocate David Duke for the highest court.
These charges are quite literally
bizarre, particularly with Limbaugh calling anyone else a racist. Newt
Gingrich has joined Limbaugh in a duet of stupidity. This is
appropriate since Gingrich is the architect of the power and policies
used by Republicans to drive the nation into its current crisis.
The
political impact for Republicans will be devastating. Sotomayor is the
first Latino nominated to the Supreme Court. Latinos represent the
fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. They went for Obama
67% to McCain’s 33%, and comprised 9%
of the electorate in 2008. Among Latino youth, the fastest growing
segment of the Latino population, the choice was 76% Obama compared to
19% McCain.
Sotomayor is also a woman nominee. Women comprised 53% of the electorate
in 2008 and they went for Obama 56% to 43% for McCain. Many of those
women are working and struggle with fools like Rush Limbaugh and Newt
Gingrich on a regular basis.
The
Republicans are like an early adolescent frenetically trying on new
identities, each seemingly stranger than the last. Led by the Southern
wing, the party began by opposing the bailout for the big three U.S.
automakers. Acting as though the nation doesn't need any heavy
industry or a few million people don't need a job, their mask of fiscal
rigor hid the fact that key southern states have the manufacturing base
for major foreign automakers.
They
then turned to Rush and, at the same time, held a national protest in
April. Sparsely attended, this nationwide event acquired the
unfortunate name of "Tea bagging." It failed to produce anything more
than some Jerry Springer quality footage for a brief spot on local
news. Recently, the national Republican Party, backed by early
presidential aspirant Gingrich, tried to rename the Democrats as the
"Democratic Socialist Party." There is no end in sight to this parade
of irrelevant, out of touch efforts.
We're now seeing the final phases of the Republican dance macabre. The Limbaugh-Gingrich anti-Latino campaign is so dangerous that some Republican senators, including right wing Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX),
are moving away from the slanders against Sotomayor. John McCain
(R-AZ) also sees the implications for his party. He's signed up to
attend the National Council of La Raza conference this summer to counter the anti Latino rhetoric spread by other Republican leaders.
Democrats don't want people to see
pictures of Bush-Cheney torture from the prison at Guantanamo, probably
because it occurred with funding that they helped provide. They don't
want to close that facility if it means housing prisoners in the United
States. This forced their president into the extraordinary and
troubling position of maintaining current prisoners in Cuba. As the
Democratic Senators participated in the 90 to 6 vote to refuse
President Obama funds to close Guantanamo, they were resolute in
failing to mention that only10 of over 400 prisoners there are charged with a violent crime. To borrow an appropriate response, You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, at long last? Apparently not.
Democrats won't even talk about the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians due to civil strife caused by the war that they funded. Failing to talk about it means it never happened, they hope.
Despite all of the alleged but obvious
crimes of Bush-Cheney against people here and around the world, the
Democrats want to "look forward" and bypass prosecutions of any sort
against the Bush administration.
The Binary Fallacy
The binary fallacy is the crude
dialectic that assumes that the two political parties are the only
choices for voters and that what's bad for one party will always be
good for the other. As evidence for this, we have Nixon's Watergate
scandal followed by huge Democratic victories in congressional
elections. President Carter's economically distressed four years begat
the Reagan revolution and so forth.
Democrat
Party operatives see the collapse of the nation and attendant pain as
working against the Republicans since they were in control when the
decline was assured by Republican sponsored programs. The situation is
so bad, they argue, no one will take the Republicans seriously over the
near and midterm. Add the highly favorable demographics among youth,
women, and the emerging Latino population and you've got the dominant
political party of the next few decades.
Republican
loyalists speak of the risks that the Obama administration has
inherited. When he falters, as he may given the circumstances that
Republicans know all too well, his failure will assure a Republican
comeback they argue.
Both parties fail to realize two flaws in their embedded fallacy.
First,
the fallacy became a manufactured truth over decades due to the rigged
game of U.S. politics. Funding and access to major media presume
membership in one of the two major parties. Third party candidates
need to poll equal or ahead in the public opinion polls, as Ross Perot
did in 1992, in order to get any media attention or money. When the
system is heavily rigged to exclude third parties, then, of course,
there are only two choices.
The
second flaw in the binary fallacy is embodied by our current troubles.
The fallacy does not take into account successful performance during
extreme crises. We're either in a depression or we're in the most
severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Times are
desperate for tens of millions. The vast majority lives in fear of
entering the world of the unemployed, homeless, and bereft. Iraq is
the biggest foreign policy disaster in modern times. Our new plans for
an Afghanistan adventure have the potential to equal Iraq in terms of
national loss and increased threats of blowback.
One
party created the current disaster. The other has embraced the
broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that
voters want fixed -- wealth transfers to the ultra rich while the vast
majority gets just about nothing plus mindless, counter productive
fantasies of empire through war.
The
two parties and the elitists who look down their noses on the
overwhelming majority of citizens assume that the people will simply
tolerate the creation of a catastrophe by one party and the
perpetuation of that grave injustice to citizens by the other.
When you're broke, you know it.
When you're out of work, you know it.
When there are no jobs, you know it.
And when the country continues to fight overseas but does nothing to protect economic security at home, you know it.
The game is up. The party is over.
The people have a fundamental right to survive, at the very least. If
both parties continue to promote policies that leave out almost all
citizens, as is now the case, there will be alternatives that look
nothing like the current two political parties. The binary fallacy and
the two parties that fail to address our crises will be no more.
Relying solely on the failures of the opposing party while embracing
their programs will soon be defunct.
END
Special thanks to Kathyn Stone for her helpful comments.
Michael Collins is a writer in the DC
area who researches and comments on the corruptions of the new
millennium. His articles focus on the financial manipulations of The
Money Party, the abuse of power by government, and features on
elections and election fraud. His articles can be found athere. His website is called The Money Party.
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