...the America in which Eisenhower the Good decreed the construction of the interstate highway system now seems a far-off land in which even conservatives believed in public expenditures for the public good. The radical-capitalist conservatives of the past quarter-century not only haven't supported the public expenditures, they don't even believe there is such a thing as the public good. Let the Dutch build their dikes through some socialistic scheme of taxing and spending; that isn't the American way. Here, the business of government is to let the private sector create wealth -- even if that wealth doesn't circulate where it's most needed. So George W. Bush threw trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, and what did they do with it? Did the Walton family up in Bentonville raise the levees in New Orleans? Did the Bass family over in Texas write a tax-deductible check to the Mennonites for the billions of dollars they would need to rescue the elderly from inundated nursing homes?Even now, with bedraggled rescuers pulling decomposed bodies from the muck of New Orleans, Bill Frist, the moral cretin who runs the U.S. Senate, wanted its first order of business this week to be the permanent repeal of the estate tax, until the public outcry persuaded him to change course. The Republicans profess belief in trickle-down, but what they've given us is the Flood.
The world looks on in stunned amazement, unable to understand how a once great nation has grown so indifferent not just to its poor and its blacks but even to the most rudimentary self-preservation. Some of it is institutional racism, but the primary culprit is the economic libertarianism that the president still espouses whenever he sells his Social Security snake oil. It's that libertarianism, more than anything else, that has transformed a great city into an immense morgue.
But, hey -- stuff happens.
Case closed. End of story. Henceforth, anyone who continues to call themself a right-wing Republican forfeits all right to represent any district, town, city, county, state, Federal Agency, or House of Congress in the United States of America. And, needless to say, they forfeit their right to lead the country from the Oval Office, the Ranch in Texas, Kennebunkport, the deck of an aircraft carrier, Air Force one, or Barbara "[they] were underprivileged anyway" Bush's multi-million-dollar Houston home. Sad to say, but today's Republican Party, once the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now a morally bankrupt bunch of venal, corrupt, mean-spirited incompetents. And Jerry Kilgore epitomizes all those characteristics to a "t."