BY EDWIN E. VINEYARD
This political season’s crop of Republican candidates has all taken the firm stance exemplified so admirably by Pogo. None of us have been allowed to forget that several decades ago that noble comic strip adventurer boldly announced, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
The Republicans have all bravely and with faux patriotism declared that the enemy is our own government. Yes indeed, the enemy is that democratically elected government and president duly elected by the people of the United States. This government does not even have the stain on its legitimacy of having the votes of any state invalidated by a political 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision. It received the popular and the electoral vote.
It all goes back to Ronald Reagan’s stupid remark, “Government is not the solution, government is the problem.” That has been treasonously morphed into: “Government is the enemy.”
These candidates say that this constitutionally and democratically elected government is their enemy, and the Republican candidates have been lining up and running ads claiming that they are going to “fight” that federal government. Not only is this grossly unpatriotic, but as the writer’s distaff side is constantly remarking, “These people are against the government that they are running for a job to join.”
These same folk who want to “fight Washington” also claim to be super-patriots, and one is constantly flashing a recognition awarded for service as a lawyer in Iraq. He claims nobody should call him a politician, because he spent a year “fighting for our freedoms” in Iraq. Yet he has been in politics for a decade, and he claims to have saved us all by cutting taxes when he was in office.
Look at the financial mess the state is in now, and measure the success of those Republican tax cuts here and in Washington. There is a $1.3 trillion deficit from federal tax cuts enacted by Republicans eight years ago. In Oklahoma, perhaps we ought to phrase those tax cuts in a different way.
Would you vote for a guy who brags about cutting your school’s funding? How about one who votes to cut funds for saving abused children? What about cutting funding leading to the possible closing of a state institution housing mentally retarded, disabled children and adults? What about the legislator who votes to cut funding to your colleges, causing constant increases in college tuition for your son or daughter?
What do you think of a person who accepts charitable gifts, and then goes out and becomes a vicious critic of the giver and wants to fight him? Republicans have done just that.
The so-called “stimulus” funds, which Republicans voted against in Washington, have saved the state of Oklahoma from complete financial disaster for two fiscal years [until 2011]. Without these funds, we would have fired thousands of teachers, closed down schools, limited enrollments or closed colleges, closed prisons, shut down services to half of those clients of abuse or with mental health needs, put old ladies out of nursing homes on the curbs, and many other dastardly deeds. There would have been little or no highway and bridge program without stimulus funds. Would you vote for the guys who do this?
Yet these candidates who are vowing to go and fight Washington or the president have given no credit to “the enemy” for having saved this state and many others in similar straits. They give no credit for the good that “the enemy” has done over their objections and without their support.
One wonders if the voters will really turn out to be as ignorant as these candidates think. They are counting on just that, of course.
The Republicans sent to Washington have done nothing to help solve any problems these past two years. They voted “NO” and obstructed every effort of the other party and the president to do something positive. Does no one ever stop to question: “What kind of awful mess would we be in today if those yahoos had been in charge or had succeeded in having their way?”
The president and the Democratic Congress have been busy trying to do something good for the country. It has been difficult. The Republicans have fought against every proposal, large or small, for the people of this country to get a break in their struggle against corporate and other special interests. Examine every Republican position taken over the past year and a half. Invariably these favor the wealthy and the powerful over the common man.
Is government with an agenda centered on “by the people and for the people” really the “enemy” of the voters? Are we voters just a bunch of dumb driven cattle with no minds of our own? Evidently some think so.
Every time a politician says he wants to go and fight our government, he displays a seditious disloyalty to this nation and its constitution. He should be run out of town.
– Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate, lives in Enid, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
