Deficits Are Not Bad; Party of Hoover Edition

The Republicans will run this country off the cliff before they will agree to raise taxes on anybody. So their answers to reducing the Federal budget deficit are to tighten the screws on the poor, the middle class and seniors. They'll let our national infrastructure fall to pieces (think Tim Pawlenty and I-35), they'll let public education descend to a system of test-prep courses (kids won't be able to do a damned thing, but by the Jeez, they can pass a test), but hands off of the rich and big business.

Republican practices led to the Gulf Oil Spill and the housing bubble/mortgage meltdown crisis. It has been Republicans who have run this country off the rails, as any casual look at Federal deficits for the last thirty years will show. Republicans brought us the specter of massive bank defaults a few years ago and the S&L debacle in the 1980s. Between the ideology of the GOP and the short-term greed embodied on ghouls like the Koch Brothers

Why anyone with three functioning neurons would trust those lunatics to operate an open-air Dairy Queen in Anchorage, Alaska in February, much less try to do anything about the economy, is beyond me. Republicans are ideologues who are as able to deal with economic facts and realities as would be a faith-healer who had to deal with a case of appendicitis.

But there are enough people who are following the GOP tin-flute sirens. Hell, there are millions of people who would vote for candidates who have no idea in which colony the Battle of Concord took place,[2] who Paul Revere was trying to warn,[3] (both of those candidates apparently slept through fourth grade history) or who is totally engrossed with the idea of trying to prevent man-on-dog sex.[4]

There are days when I think that sooner or later, the crazies will gain power and they will bring to fruition the GOP's century-long quest to smash the American economy, impoverish 99% of the American population and bring this country back to the social and living standards of the 1890s.[5] Of course, they've forgotten that the taxation of the 19th Century was insufficient to support a large standing national defense establishment, but that makes no difference to them.

Maybe we just ought to get it over with and get to doing what the Republicans want: Reducing this great country to Third or Fourth World nation with nuclear weapons.[6]
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[1] And the oil industry, the coal industry, the automotive industry, the Midwestern power generator, well, you get the idea. The Koch brothers are just the most effective ones at generating astroturf groups.
[2] Michele Bachmann
[3] Sarah Palin
[4] Rick Santorum
[5] Only because I think it unlikely that they will be able to institute legal slavery. Otherwise, it'll be the 1830s with electricity, but only for the rich.
[6] Like Russia.