A Nation of Republican Whiners

Here is the link to Paul Krugman"s latest editorial post, the gist is that the Republican Party has become a nation of whiners.

"Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

One of the biggest gripes that keeps on giving, and I read some form of it every day published in the opinion section of my newspapers, or on the local blogs, is that government is the enemy and needs to be severely limited. Yet the right wing conservatives have been in charge for most of the last 28 years and have done nothing towards accomplishing that goal. The Bush White House has actually expanded the federal bureaucracy as well as federal power, plowing over the limit into the realm of being illegal and taking away rights guaranteed by the Constitution. 

Instead of going in and trimming the actual federal agencies, getting rid of relics like the CIA and Army Core of Engineers, which has ruined anything they have ever touched, they went and deregulated. Getting rid of the rules and oversight where people use your money, and not providing any safety nets or guarantees when the whole house of cards falls apart and crashes down. So, we get screwed and people like Alan Greenspan just say, oops, I guess I was wrong...

The more dimwitted ones still haven't figured out that the ideas they have been puppeting don't work in the real world, and don't have the imagination to roll up their sleeves and help come up with pragmatic solutions to our national problems. They are content pretending to be outsiders of the mainstream medias, and whine. When Bush came into office, he was a Washington outsider. John McCain campaigned on being the original maverick, and Congressional Republicans continue to gripe about the Obama administration, which hasn't even taken office yet. Southern racial backlash is provided with Republican leaders thinking " Barack the Magic Negro " is cool and funny, and reward themselves by getting elected to lead the RNC... 

The more childish ones who haven't emotionally grown past the age of 16, think they are in a culture war, that they are revolutionaries in a war against liberalism which has become associated with socialism and Communism, and those are fighting words! Because I live in a military town, I hear a lot of this coupled with male anger, shouted or written by people who are not prone towards introspection, but blindly follow orders, or assimilate what they are told on AM radio talk shows by personalities who do not have the attention span to read anything in depth.

It's not that the government needs to be expanded or limited, but whether you have an open, honest, and responsible government. These are not ideals, but should be the fundamental operating procedures of any government, leaning liberal or conservative. KISS.