Grumpy Lion

Charles F. Bass, identified in today’s Globe as a ‘former US representative from New Hampshire’, writes a long, pathetic whine, crawling with lies and distortions, about the greatness of the Republican Party and its need to recover its former glory.

Here’s some of it, with snarls provided by The Lion:

Why has the Republican Party let the Democrats cast us as the party that caters to the rich and the elite? Wasn’t it a Republican president who freed millions of Americans from the bondage of slavery?

First, note the plaint of victimization. Note the whine of ‘The Democrats did this to us. It’s all their fault.’ That’s typical Republicanism. No matter what they do, no matter who they hurt, no matter the destruction their policies wreak in the country and the world, it’s not their fault.

And isn’t it about time this bunch of hypocrites, this crew of immoral and unethical loudmouths stopped pretending they had anything to do with what Lincoln did a hundred and fifty years ago. Convenient of Mr. Bass to forget the horrors visited on Blacks for the next hundred years by racist, segregationist Americans. It wasn’t a Republican who brought about the Civil Rights legislation of the Sixties, but it was Republicans who fought desperately against it. And convenient also for Mr. Bass to forget Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which was nothing but blatant racism, served up with regard only for the votes it could garner from white bigots. Perhaps Mr. Bass conveniently forgot Ronald Reagan opening his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a coded speech on ‘states rights’ to the people who just loved their Klan so much when their Klan murdered three civil rights workers named Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman and buried them in an earth dam.

Lincoln would spit in the faces of modern Republicans, including Mr. Bass.

Why has the Republican Party let the Democrats cast us as the party that opposes a clean environment? Wasn’t it a Republican president who created the first national park in America, the National Park Service, and the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire? Wasn’t it a Republican president who created the Environmental Protection Agency, authored the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Hazardous Waste Act?

To answer Mr. Bass’s first question, Republicans spent the last eight years doing everything they could to increase the amount of filth corporations friendly to the Republican Party were allowed to pour into the environment. Mr. Bass prefers to look to the distant past rather than to the present, in which his party has done everything it could to foul the earth, the air, the rivers, and the seas.

Mr. Bass and others will no doubt say that the policies of the Bush administration were an aberration. Mr. Bass will no doubt forget that the Republicans lined up in perfect solidarity with Bush’s destructive policies of greed and destruction. In that, Mr. Bass is a true Republican.

Why has the Republican Party let the Democrats cast us as the party of big oil, gas, and coal? Wasn’t it a Republican president who broke up the huge oil trusts in America? Wasn’t it a Republican president who first called for energy independence through the development of alternative energy resources?

The Republicans are the party of fossil fuels because the fossil fuel corporations owned the Republican party. And as for ‘alternative energy resources’, that is nothing more than Republican-speak for tearing up every available inch of American soil for more oil and more gas instead of buying it overseas. To sane people ‘alternative energy resources’ means wind, solar, geothermal, and so on, sources that will, one hopes, avert a catastrophic climate change that will wipe civilization from the face of the planet. Republicans never met an oilman’s dollar they didn’t want to pocket.

And let’s not forget that it was a Republican president who rejected the only significant climate plan, the Kyoto Protocol, that had a chance of at least starting international cooperation on the matter. The same President, cheered and enabled by the Republican Party and Congressional Republicans, fought tooth and nail against every climate initiative for eight lost years.

Why has the Republican Party allowed Democrats to portray us as the party of war? Have we forgotten that Republican presidents ended the Vietnam War, broke the back of communism without firing a single shot, and successfully liberated Kuwait from Iraq in only 19 days?

Republicans are the party of war, the party of chaos, the party of destruction and death. They’ve earned the title ‘Party of War’.

A Republican president invaded Cambodia and turned that country into a genocidal slaughterhouse. A Republican president dragged the Vietnam war on in order to keep his party in power. It wasn’t a Republican president that ended the war: it was a Republican president who was in office when the Vietnamese ran the United States out of their country.

As for Kuwait, let’s not forget it was a Republican president who used a false story about babies being dumped from incubators to gin up support for that war. It was a Republican president who told the Shi’ites in Southern Iraq to revolt against Saddam Hussein and then stood by while Hussein slaughtered them by the tens of thousands.

And as for the great myth of Ronald Reagan bringing down communism single-handedly, that is one of the greatest loads of crap ever foisted on the American public. In fact, Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest loads of crap ever foisted on the American citizenry. The claim that he ended communism, a claim that lives in the mind and mouth of every Republican, completely belies and demeans the efforts of Americans for the previous fifty years, and denigrates the real work that was done by Russians, fully at risk of life and liberty, to change their system of government from the inside.

Ronald Reagan was a virtually senile old man from Day One. He was driven by ideology at the expense of reason, fact, and evidence – an all too common Republican affliction, brought to its height, or depths, by George W. Bush. Anyone who criticizes school lunch programs by saying ketchup is a vegetable, as Reagan did, demonstrates a pathology all too common among Republicans, one that fervently believes dollars are far more important than people, and that seeks to enact that belief into law.

So yes, Mr. Bass, the Republicans are the party of war. It was Republicans who brought us Iraq, again, and again based on lies, on falsehoods of the basest sort, canards dealt to the public for the sole purpose of satisfying the bloodthirsty egos of Republicans in the White House and in Congress. Republicans are considered the party of war because they have earned the designation.

And they earned it by beating up on weak countries with weak armies. Republican presidents invaded Grenada, invaded Panama, invaded Iraq. Yeah, big bad macho Republican presidents invading pathetically weak little countries and crowing about it. Undoubtedly Mr. Bass is as proud of that as he would be if Republicans had actually fought and won a war with an enemy of equal power to ours. But Republicans don’t fight those kinds of wars.

In fact, they don’t really want to fight at all. Their last President and his Vice-President refused to fight in Vietnam. In fact their last President, after landing a cushy stateside berth in the Air Guard and noting on his enlistment form that he did not want to serve in the war zone, abandoned his post so he could do some politicking. And the other guy simply refused outright. He had ‘other priorities’.

And there’s the little matter of comparing Congressional Republicans to Democrats on the matter of military service. Republicans didn’t. Democrats did. And it’s Republicans who don’t give a damn about sending American children off to war to do the killing and dying that Republicans use to keep themselves in power.

You’ve earned the ‘Party of War’ label, Mr. Bass, you’ve earned it, and it’s a label written in the blood of innocents you sent to die, of innocents you and yours slaughtered from the comfort and safety of your plush Congressional and White House offices.

And why has the Republican Party become the defender of a healthcare system no one likes? Why can’t we be the party that responds to the Democrats’ determination to federalize healthcare by offering our own proposals that make healthcare more competitive, more affordable, and more efficient?

Because, as with the fossil fuels industry, the healthcare business owns you. It was a Republican president who pushed through a budget-busting Medicare drug program and who insisted that it not have the power to bargain for lower prices from the pharmaceutical industry, the same industry that wrote the bill.

Republicans can’t offer a better healthcare plan because they don’t want a rational plan that provides good healthcare for all Americans. Republicans can’t offer a better healthcare plan because Republicans are dedicated to seeing that the private insurance companies continue to reap obscene profits off the suffering, pain, and misery of sick Americans. Republicans can’t offer a better healthcare plan because they don’t want to, because their ideology insists that it is more dignified for a sick person to die in the street in front of a hospital than for the government to help that person: after all, helping him might weaken his moral fiber.

The column goes on and on with more drivel and lies and distortions. Mr. Bass isn’t interested in reality, and neither are his fellow Republicans. They have nothing to offer America, not anymore, and haven’t had for a long time. They said nothing but ‘Yes’ to George W. Bush’s destructive, sickening policies, and they say nothing but ‘No’ to Barack Obama as he tries to fix the horrific damage done by Bush and the Republicans who followed him in jackbooted lockstep.

Mr. Bass closes his column with the statement, “If we do all of this, we will return to our rightful place as the party that has earned the trust, admiration, and faith of the American people.”

Abraham Lincoln would spit in their faces, and Teddy Roosevelt would probably shoot the sleazy bastards.