Republicans…..

Some time ago, I watched the following video (of the Peoria, IL “Tea-party” “rally’:

And I made a one sentence comment:
“I hope that someone had a defibrillator.”

11 months later, the owner of the video “demolished” me:

@ultraollie At least they all probably have long form birth certificates and their college, medical & legislative records are not sealed. It kills you to think that plenty of young people are disgusted with Communist totalitarianism in US government. How old is your buddy Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, George Soros? LOL

Hmm, I didn’t know that most people’s college and medical records were public access. As far as legislative records…hmmm, those are open public access, no? Of course, what is the birth certificate nonsense anyway? In what passes for a mind, this person must think that the State of Hawaii and all of the local newspapers were involved in some conspiracy to cover up a non-existent birth….almost 50 years ago?

Then we get to the phrase “communist totalitarianism”. Hmm, if the current administration was really that, would this video be allowed to stay up? Didn’t the communist totalitarians throw dissenters in jail and sometimes execute them?

Now as to my friends: “Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank”: if memory serves me, they were all reelected in 2010 and Sen. Reid’s election was an upset win over a….oh yes….TEA PARTY candidate! George Soros? Well, he is still a multimillionaire so I suppose that he is doing well…

Anyway, as far as the tea-party types: yes, I know that they are more educated than average (most people don’t have college degrees…so even a C+ business student with a 22 on their ACT would technically be “above average” when compared with the general public.

But take a good look at this crowd. How would THEY feel if the Ryan “medicare plan” was imposed on them? Really, why shouldn’t it be? If the plan is so great, impose it now.

Of course the Republicans don’t have the guts to do that; they were elected in large part due to the “government hands off of my Medicare” crowd.

But if you think that I am hard on Republicans, check out this Rolling Stone article. The article itself doesn’t say anything I haven’t said over the past couple of days; the Ryan plan is to give even more tax cuts for the rich and to destroy all of the more socialist governmental programs. But just read what Matt Taibbi has to say:

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.

Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.

Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.

The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The author goes on to point out is that the real cost driver are things like Medicare in which we spend hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to keep some old fart alive for a couple of weeks in an intensive care ward of a hospital.

Mr. Taibbi isn’t through with the Republicans though:

Here is how old friend David Brooks, taking a break from his authorship of breathless master-race treatises, put it in a recent column called “Moment of Truth”:

[...]
Brooks then goes on to slobber over all of Ryan’s ostensibly daring proposals, from the Medicare block grants to the more obnoxious Medicare voucher program (replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers to buy overpriced private insurance, which Brooks calls the government “giving you a sum of money” to choose from “a regulated menu of insurance options”).

What he doesn’t mention is that Ryan’s proposal also includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years.

Since Brooks himself is talking about Ryan’s plan cutting $4 trillion over the next ten years (some say that number is higher), what we’re really talking about here is an ambitious program to cut taxes for people like… well, people like me and David Brooks, and paying for it by “consolidating job-training programs” and forcing old people to accept reduced Medicare benefits. [...]

But the icing on the cake comes when a guy like David Brooks – like me a coddled, overcompensated media yuppie whose idea of sacrifice is raking one’s own leaves – comes out and calls Paul Ryan courageous for having the guts to ask seniors to cut back on their health care in order to pay for our tax breaks.

I have to admit that I laughed long and hard over that one.

And to the tea party owner of the Peoria Tax Day video: THAT is how you insult someone. Take notes.

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