Republicans vs. Democrats.

"Which do you believe?"

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

10/20/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/rvd.htm

I wasn’t planning on writing an essay at 5:30 in the morning.

It was just that on Usenet, a right winger posted one of those "us vs. them" things that are so popular with both sides. This one (and I have no idea who "Immortalist" is, or if he was the author or not) was written just well enough to draw a response from me.

In the interests of openness, the responses to the "Republicans believe" segments are, with grammatical editing, as I wrote when I responded to the post. The responses to "Democrats believe" were added after the fact.

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 19:40:14 -0700, "Immortalist" <Reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> wrote:

Hence the Patriot Act and massive debt.

Democrats know exactly what the Founders meant when they talked about "no law respecting an establishment of religion." They meant that no religious activity of any sort should ever be on the taxpayer’s dime, and nobody should ever be taxed to support someone else’s church. This means that the government must never foster religious activity, nor impede it among the citizenry. The Founders also acknowledged the right of people to have weapons for hunting and self-protection, but mandated that in return, they should make themselves available for militia duty. If you think the second amendment is absolute, ask yourself this: "Does the second amendment guarantee the right of undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics to acquire thermonuclear weapons?" The Founders also understood that freedom mean freedom not only from government tyranny, but from economic, social and religious tyranny as well.

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Hence record deficits, and the prospect of huge tax increases in the future, not for public works, but simply to finance the notes held by international banks and big brokerage houses.

Redistribution of wealth is the basic definition of an economy. If money is the life blood of an economy, the redistribution mechanism of government is the heart. Just as blood is useless if it is not pumped, wealth is useless if it is allowed to follow its natural course (which in the case of blood is called gravitational lividity) and accumulate with a small percentage of ultra wealthy.

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Hence their refusal to let 10% of the population marry because they feel squeamish and think it will upset their invisible cosmic sky muffin.

A glance at the Presidential candidates in the 60s will reveal the mewling hypocrisy behind this lie. George Bush "served" in a low risk "champagne unit," and supported a war that he himself was unwilling to join. Nearly all of his administration, and indeed much of the leadership of the Republican party, are also "chickenhawks." In the meantime, John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam, served with great honor, and then found the moral courage to come back and tell the American people what was really going on over there. Which strikes you as the better example of "personal responsibility"?

Hence the blind support of failing charter schools, and the demand that the public be forced to finance flat-earth academies that insist the earth was created in six days and the devil put dinosaur bones in the earth to fool us into incorrect thought.

Parents HAVE the choice to send their children to private schools, to flat-earth academies, or keep them home and teach them that evolution is a Communist plot. They just can’t do it on the taxpayer’s dime. While some charter schools have functioned well, the majority have been failures, just more examples of what happens when you subsidize something with tax money and demand no accounting for it. It didn’t work with military contractors, it didn’t work with multinational corporations, and it doesn’t work to blindly subsidize private schools. Blind, non-accountable tax subsidies are nothing more than licences to steal.

And that tyranny is fine just so long as it's privatized tyranny. The might of the factory owner and the banker and the priest is more beneficial than that of the people being self-governing to prevent such intrusions on their individual freedoms.

Heart is to blood as government is to the economy. If profitability is the only criteria for support by the public, why keep the elderly and the infirm alive?

And thus promptly promulgate all such things in the name of empowering big business.

And in fact, under progressive taxes and government "pump priming," Americans – all Americans and not just the wealthiest 10% – became the richest and most productive people on earth. We cut poverty by two thirds between 1950 and 1974 and then let it double again under Republican administrations. As for bureaucracies being evils easily avoided by free market forces, try dealing with an HMO. Indeed, Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan would have cut bureaucratic paperwork by two thirds, and saved hundreds of millions.

And then elect leaders who never served to ignite wars in which their children will never serve, whilst fighting for a low-cost justice system that rejects the right of the people to redress against corporate abuses and wastes as little time as possible on determining the guilt of the accused.

It’s indisputable that crime is a function of the economy. When times are good for the poorer people, crime drops. When times are rough, crime rises. Dostoevski believed that the character and worth of a culture could be ascertained by how it treated its prisoners. America has one of the vilest and most unnecessarily cruel justice and prison systems in the civilized world, and only a fool pretends that it is somehow producing a better class of citizens as a result. Republicans are also big on penalizing the poor for such victimless crimes as drug use and prostitution.

Restrictions such as not dumping raw sewage into the stream for the edification of the folks down stream, not draining a swamp that not only provides natural environment but community income from hunters and other sportsmen, or restrictions that prevent truckers from belching tons of particulate matter into the air 24/7, thus denying the right of your children to a case of free market asthma.

The notion that a person should be reimbursed for restraining himself from poisoning his neighbors or destroying the scenic value of the land is ludicrous in the extreme, and yet this is exactly what Republicans want: legalized blackmail that permits a property owner to say, "I won’t build a plant that dumps toxins in the air, but I want you to pay me for not building it."

That's why we spend nearly half a trillion dollars a year for a military that is strapped by invading two of the weakest, most backward countries on earth and no longer has the manpower left over to deal with hurricanes in an area where hurricanes are frequent.

We spend a half a trillion dollars on a military that is tapped by two local brush wars. They went in undermanned and underequipped, poor starving waifs who only got a half a trillion dollars a year to sustain themselves on. But I don’t blame the military for this state of affairs. The blame mostly goes to greedy and corrupt military contractors such as Halliburton, who have systematically gouged the public under the false pretenses of patriotic support of "our troops" while cheating the hell out of those very troops.

Freedoms such as lack of redress and irresponsible and complete control of the media, and values like propaganda in lieu of debate and starting unprovoked wars against third-world countries and slaughtering the civilian populations by bombing the cities.

In other words, the schoolyard bullies are whining because they aren’t allowed to call the little kids "girlie-men" and beat them up.

And yet they are the originators of such things as "The Enemies List," people who believe it is ok to fire employees for having a Kerry bumper sticker on their car, or who protest when vandals destroying an opponent’s yard signs are jailed, and who claim that liberals should not be given a voice in newspapers, on television, or in the news, because that would be "liberal bias."

No, but they believe that all who oppose freedom must in turn be opposed.

But that only 1% of the population are "real" citizens, and the rest are all just a bunch of whiny liberals who try to take what the priviledged elite stole fair and square.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Rights and freedoms are for EVERYONE, and not just those who can afford them, or who deal from a position of power.

If only Republicans would REALLY ask themselves that question. Your party leader is a man who forced a young girl into an illegal abortion, wrangled a cushy seat in a air national guard and then flunked out because he was too intoxicated and dissolute for even that, had a succession of well-paying sinecures provided by the Saudis and other oil-rich family friends, made money only in a position in which he made no investment and did no work, stole the presidency, never worked an honest day in his life, mocked prisoners on death row, told the people lies too numerous to count, and who has destroyed the federal budget, putting the country at grave risk, and who has started two unprovoked wars, alienating nearly all of America's friends and leaving the nation adrift. His stand for human decency came when he replaced a brutal dictator in Iraq with the man who conducted "medical experiments" in said dictator's prisons, a man who celebrated his ascension by going into a local police station and shooting to death six prisoners at random, and who was subsequently awarded the opportunity to recite an Administration-scripted speech to a joint session of Congress.

Do you REALLY think he's what Jefferson had in mind for America?

A good way to close. I’ll just note that Clinton had the cleanest administration in the 20^th century, with nothing worse to show after ten years of frantic investigations at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars than some minor sexual indiscretions.

Putsch, in the meantime, has blundered into two pointless wars at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, has driven the country into bankruptcy, runs the most overbearing and secretive regime in American history, and refuses to account for its actions.

Which, do you suppose, better exemplifies "ethical conduct"?