The GOP: The Party of Greed and Bleed

I just read this post by SusanG over at the DailyKos and I thought it summed things up rather neatly.

Money and war, war and money. The mantra of the modern Republican Party.

I've come to the reluctant conclusion that every single decision - not just a vast majority of decisions, but every single one -- made in the past six years by the ruling GOP leads back to these twin motivators, with war secondary in the service of obscene accumulations of wealth by a small coterie of cronies, criminals and corporatists.

Funny, isn't it, how times change? Once upon a time, Christians considered avarice a sin. Now they consider serving as ignorant foot soldiers in the army of a few self-selected Gekkos a sign of grace. Jesus, had he a grave, would certainly be rolling over in it now, watching middle and working-class Americans - and the rest of the world - being bled with the help of his followers so that the top's illimitable greed is fed.

We are bled at the gas pump. We are bled at the workplace. We are even bled in our homes as heating oil prices soar while energy companies reap the greatest profit in human history and object to paying their fair share of taxes on it.

And of course, there's the literal blood, of Iraqis and American troops spilled in the sands and streets of the Middle East. America bleeds in the mines of West Virginia., floats face down in the streets of New Orleans, drops dead from Vioxx. So very, very many victims. And, of course, no perpetrators, because people who loathe government are in charge of government, and they most sacredly aver that government has no real role in safety issues, disaster preparedness or illness prevention. No role in preparation or prevention at all, in fact, in their ideal, privatized world.

Unless, of course, it comes to "preventive war." There the GOP has its priorities straight: no money to prevent levee flooding in New Orleans, but the far-sightedness to spend a trillion to kill people half a world away whom our leaders knew from the beginning had done us no injury and posed us no threat.

Lying, in short, in the service of money and war.

Democrats in this election year need to ask Americans: Why would you put a party in charge of government that wants to abolish it, that views it as only capable of evil? Transpose this nonsense into any other realm and contemplate the resultant absurdity: Imagine hiring a symphony conductor who loathes orchestras, or assigning literacy tutoring to someone who believes the written word should be abolished. What would be the end result? Surely similar to what we have now: a ruling party that refuses to take responsibility for the failure of the end result.

Republicans have evolved into masters of outsourcing blame, even within the borders of our own country: on GM workers who have been led to believe they contracted their labor for some health coverage as well as wages; on seniors who paid into Social Security all their working lives, only to be told their "greed" for monthly $900 checks is breaking the system while the trust fund is raided; on the children of this country who deserve well-funded schools and decently paid teachers.

The economic and social failures of this ruling class - its inability to ... well ... rule competently - are shifted to the victims of their corrupt and impracticable ideology. It's our fault that working hard and playing by the rules no longer buys a house in the suburbs or gets us health coverage or buys our children a decent education. We got greedy and lazy, not them, and our rumblings of discontent earn us labels as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." As such, it's perfectly okay to use the government to invade our bedrooms, our doctor's offices, our reproductive systems, our phone lines, our Internet connections, even our deathbeds - and then lie about it and evade even anemic attempts to find out what the hell is going on. All secrecy is legitimatised for government, while the citizens retain no zone of privacy at all.

Democrats, take heed. It's time to talk straight to the American people. The modern Republican Party can best be summed up as devoted to lying and spying while others do the dying.

All in the service of greed and bleed, of money and war.