Current Comedy: “If at First You Don’t Secede …”

What do you call someone who cheers and sneers when our country fails and works constantly against our successes? What about someone who schemes to starve our fellow Americans, gleefully engineers their impoverishment and homelessness, lie to their families and friends to get them to ignore their crimes and then joyfully demeans millions of others for being offended at their chicanery?

Well, personally, back in my construction worker days I would have leaned towards the 14 letter phrase that translates loosely into proper English as copulating rectum, though probably, a more accurate single 7 letter word would be traitor. However, for the sake of this article, I will simply use the common 10 letter term for such people: Republican.

Of course, dear reader, do understand I realize that may appear an unduly harsh thing to say. Understand as well, I am painfully aware considering the hostile demeanor of many GOP rank & file that that kind of language is risky since I live in a community that is 70% GOP. And not your Orange County, Polo shirt wearing, white-whine Republicans; but the hardcore “hoist the rebel flag on the back of your pick-up, hate gays, dismiss minorities, pass no loitering laws, try to avoid paying your share of taxes for a functioning government at all costs, Obama’s a Kenyan & W was your hero”-type Republicans.

While we liberals in Mohave County may suffer from an excess of such Republicanism, we by no means have a lock on the market.   In the weeks following the election, predictably but pathetically, disgruntled GOP bought armaments of all sorts and in 40 different states went to the Whitehouse website itself to toss down the gauntlet and post their petitions to secede. That’s right, if Obama was going to be president, they would rather leave the nation. Or rather in some blind fantasy would rather their state’s non-existent but imagined untold wealth to give the evil Obama the weakening he deserves.

The irony here is that these folks, especially here in the red states where such attitudes prevail; seem to think secession would be to their advantage. But then since those red states contribute a minimal amount of tax revenue and require a maximum amount of government services, since they face the greatest amount social problems such as alcoholism, teen pregnancy, obesity,  and in-breeders named Bubba, the rest of the country will be better off without you.

It is also worth keeping in mind that given how intertwined state and federal resources and finances are, even with such stellar Tea Party governors like Texas’ Rick Perry and our own Jan Brewer, no actual red state governments have endorsed the idea of secession, only those states’ more desperate, pathetic racists.

Well, if at first you don’t secede, don’t let the door knob hit you in the behind on your way out the door. Still, playing the pouty little four year old isn’t going to fix the problems our country is facing. The majority of the economic woes Romney whined about were created by you guys. All that bleeding heart BS about your worries about the deficit? Well why did you make it in the first place? Obama came in with 11 trillion of debt from you guys and Bush. You knew you were borrowing 40% on the dollar instead of collecting taxes for a decade for phony wars, pork barrels by the bucket-load, and foolish tax cuts for the plutocrats, but that crap was OK because a Republican was doing it. But talk about money to fund schools, provide health care for the elderly, or rebuilding our roads and rails before yet another trainload of toxic chemicals derails into yet another river, and now it’s “no that stuff is too expensive, don’t understand money doesn’t grow on trees?” Please.

See? That’s why I oppose the conservative values agenda, and it’s not so much the R or the D behind the name, as the ideology in general. The GOP like to act all morally superior, until no one is watching. You want to talk about being responsible, talk about this: The government borrows 40% of all it spends because the GOP resist taxes, which means that we owe the money later anyway. You can’t run government without money, and you can’t run a society this complex or an economy this fragile without one; so who are they helping with this anti-tax BS? The public who at some point will still have to pay for the debt through future taxes anyway or the GOP’s banker friends who get the pay back either way guaranteed?

You can't cut away 40% of government spending without ravaging the government (the parts we all depend on) and the economy that depends on consumer spending to function no matter what the propagandists of the “job creators” try to tell you. You guys still falling for that rouse about government being nothing but waste and if we just cut this and just cut that, then everything will be better? Politicians on both sides of the aisle have been selling that canard and hacking away at social service funding for so long in most government agencies where cutting even  possible have already been slashed to the point our government is already on life support after 30 years of a concerted effort to drown it in the bathtub. Do the math.

 I suck at math & i can tell you it can't be done and shouldn't be done and there is no rational reason to wish it except for personal greed or other avarice. The federal government is a job creator no matter what lies GOP might spin, it creates 4 million jobs directly and tens of millions otherwise through contracts and employee spending on their lives.  And that’s just a fraction of the eighteen million local and state employees. More than twenty million people, 11% of all the jobs are government job.

 Real people, real services provided and real money spent in their communities and our common economy, and that isn't even talking about the folks who receive services through the government and the impact their lives have on the economy. All that costs money and GOP rail about taxes but they spend money at a faster rate than Dems. (Obama's spending V Reagan/Bush I or II? It's no contest.) So what are you going to do? Cut ALL federal jobs? That hardly dents the deficit, if that's what you’re concerned about? About all those food stamp moochers and unemployment deadbeats? Well that public aid goes DIRECTLY to living expenses for the poor and straight back into the economy in the form of their personal spending. They aren't Romney shipping the money to off shore accounts you know? Or did you think that far? Cut off all aid to the supposed 47% of losers who supposedly leech off of faultless sinless noble you? Kill off the population?

For the past 40 years Republicans have driven this country pretty much however they’ve wanted , which appears to have been straight into the ground. We followed their policies into the S&L crisis, into Iran-Contra, into Enron, into two should destroying wars and into gutting our public to give trillions to the banksters designed our disaster in the first place. And then wag your supposed holier than thou ness in our faces as if that trumped all other points?  What makes you think you appear trustworthy in any fashion in the first place. You guys are just the bullies that have been running the show. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it, or that America as a whole isn’t getting sick of it.

Here is a little story illustrating what I am talking about. According to Romney, Ryan and the rest of the Republican talking heads,  the purposes of government isn’t to ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, or provide defense for the public against predators foreign or domestic. No, for the GOP the purpose is accelerate the process of serving up the poor for the rich to eat them and demonizing and restricting all minorities who won’t vote conservative. Which, I guess, is all well and good if you are a member of the club.  Except like Fight Club, they aren’t supposed to admit these aims to the public. Flags, guns and Jesus are all the public should see.

So when Romney grumbled out loud in a post-election taped phone call about how the fabled 47% had let America down, he let the cat our of the bag that Republicans basically hate the public and see them only as prey. So, other GOP still hoping to bilk the public into thinking they might have souls, turned on him like they do everyone else. No honor among thieves I guess.

Finding that kind of crap hilarious, I shared an article about the sharks eating their own with the general Facebook public. Following the leaking of his post-election donor phone call, according to some reporters, Romney appeared to have become the most hated man in America. Next thing I know an area Republican, Mohave County District two Supervisor, Hildy Angius felt obliged to assert no matter how much I thought I hated Romney, she hated Obama 16 trillion times more, because, as is typical of GOP, she believes her opinions aren’t just more important than anyone else’s, but trillions of times more important.

It's that senseless sense of hyperbole and mock outrage the GOP typically employ that is part of the attitude i find offensive. If i actually hated Romney, which i don't, there would be no way any other single person could hate Obama 16 trillion times more. One person = one person. That’s a false sense of entitlement and elitism. Romney wasn't ever hate-able in himself. He was just a salesman, for other people's ideas. I battled the ideas. Why waste energy hating in the first place much less hating a figurehead. Like the song goes, "Republicans need a puppet and you fit/got their hands so far up your rear they call you Mitt."

No wonder folks like Romney and Boehner can so casually discuss destroying the education of a nation and call for the starvation and impoverishment of millions of poor, disabled, elderly, veterans, and/or unemployed. If those people aren’t GOP then they don’t matter. Even if they are GOP, if I can’t make money with or off of them, they don’t matter. They might as well not even exist. No matter what possible tragedy or agony they might be going through, it isn’t even equal to a trillionth of a Republican’s minor irritation. Typical Republican I guess. Maybe, if she’s lucky she’ll realize the error of her ways & her math. If not, maybe we’ll be lucky and she’ll want to secede like the rest of the Tea Party math deficients. So the people who actually love America can try to repair some of the messes they’ve made.

 --mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.