Posted on Mar 22, 2012
AP / Steven Senne
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at the University
of Chicago.
By Robert Scheer
With Mitt Romney's super-PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at
the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote
against Barack Obama: Either they are desperate to return a white man
to the White House or they feel strongly that it is time to break the
glass ceiling denying Mormons the presidency.
Out of a sense of tolerance I could cotton to the latter—heck, why
should the bizarre beliefs of Romney's church be a deal breaker? I'm
hoping for a strong Jewish contender someday and wouldn't like her
burdened with defending Old Testament claptrap.
The problem in this mind-numbing Republican primary season is that the
campaign has exposed Romney as not just another white male Mormon like
some of the fairly reasonable senators who have represented Utah. Or
like Romney's own father, George, at one time the governor of
Michigan. No, this Romney is now widely regarded as the vulture
capitalist he is, a politician who is a say-and-do-anything
opportunist with no moral limits on his outsized ambitions.
Nothing is sacred to the former Massachusetts governor, not even his
own signature health plan that he sold to that state's voters as the
standard for rational government decision-making as regards the deep
problems faced by our economy. The weaknesses of what Romney and the
GOP deride as Obamacare have been all too obvious in the plan Romney
touted in Massachusetts—a mandate to sign up without the cost
restraints that a single-payer government program would offer. Now,
with a new national plan from Rep. Paul Ryan emerging from the U.S.
House, Romney and the Republican Party generally seek to compound that
error by undermining Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that offer at
least a modicum of cost control. Instead, the candidate and his
fellow Republicans would turn consumers over completely to the tender
mercies of for-profit insurers.
The justification for gutting what little remains of enlightened
government programs to aid the vulnerable is, of course, the dreaded
federal deficit. (Lest we forget, seniors were foremost among the
vulnerable until the arrival of the programs now under attack.) What
is so outrageously hypocritical about the proposals from both Romney
and Ryan is that they do not touch, and indeed would further open, the
spending spigot that caused all of the red ink following President
Bill Clinton's budget-balancing act.
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Both Romney and Ryan want to increase President George W. Bush's tax
breaks for the wealthy, which seriously cut revenues while treating as
sacrosanct the Cold War levels in military spending that Bush put in
place in a wildly irrational response to the 9/11 attacks. This week
Ryan announced that defense spending is off-limits, and Romney has
campaigned for an increase in what represents more than 40 percent of
the non-mandated federal budget.
I can't wait for the moment in a presidential debate when Romney talks
about the need for even more advanced U.S. weaponry to counter the
emerging military threat from Communist China and Obama ever so coolly
points out that Bain Capital, the company that Romney co-founded, has
been supplying those Red tyrants with surveillance equipment to better
monitor their citizenry.
With Ron Paul's fortunes as a presidential candidate declining, there
is no pressure on GOP leaders to link a withdrawal from the imperial
adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan with a reduced federal handout to
the military-industrial complex. Nor will the Republican leadership
confront the party's responsibility for the nation's economic
collapse, the subsequent loss in tax revenues, and the Fed and
Treasury policies that bailed out the Wall Street charlatans who
invented this meltdown.
Instead of reigning in Wall Street greed, the GOP is demanding a
reversal of even the tepid efforts of the Obama administration to hold
the financial industry accountable to honest business practices. And,
at a time when the largest multinational companies have shifted jobs
and profits abroad, the GOP stands for rewarding that betrayal of
American workers by eliminating all taxes on overseas corporate
profits.
The pity in all this is that a legitimate critique of the Obama
record—present to some degree in the Paul dissection of the
president's war policy and his continuation of the Bush Wall Street
bailout strategy—will not be heard in the general election debate.
Instead, on the one hand, we will have Obama offering clever-sounding
arguments for establishment policies that fail to deal with high
unemployment, a brutal level of housing foreclosures and sharpening
income inequality. And on the other hand there will be a Republican
Party so steeped in the ethos of greed, racism and war-mongering that
it would leave even Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, were they alive,
with no choice but to vote for Obama as the lesser evil.
More:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/voters_have_two_candidates_no_choice_20120322/
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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