The Madness of Neoconservatism

Richard Jenni, a brilliant though troubled and tortured comic, once observed that it is within a man's ego to look upon himself and see nothing but what is in his mind. An overweight sow can assume because he has plastered his eyebrow down with spit he strikes an image like a matinee idol. So it is with the Republicans politicians who parade their idiocy and think that they are astute. The country is awash in debt and the right wing revisionists point to public service workers and safety nets programs as the sole source of our economic difficulty. To hear this collection of troglodytes pontificate on a balance budget is to think that they know the way to fiscal solvency. Yet the facts remain clear. You can't spend treasure on unfunded wars, you can't cut taxes when you are increasing government spending on military systems of dubious and questionable value and you can't keep proposing policies that are responsible for the mess.

Now we have Romney selecting Paul Ryan, who somehow has been labeled an intellectual, and a budget genius when he proposed among other things to create a voucher program instead of Medicare. Paper is the last thing our health care system needs. The system is awash in paper. Fact is simplistic solutions which do little but create more confusion to an already confusing and bewildering system will never do anything to improve health care. Vouchers will do nothing but unleash a host of providers who will spend millions, if not billions, to scream out to potential subscribers the benefits of their programs probably with no entity verifying their claims. Of course, the ghouls of our healthcare industry ( that would be those giant corporations who sell insurance) are just waiting to scoop all those vouchers from unsuspecting senior citizens and giving them nothing but denials and a whole lot of paper work. We need to eliminate the ghouls who have somehow gotten their greedy dirty hands in the middle of the relationship between doctor and patient. We don't need someone sitting in an office in Hartford to determine what are medical necessities and we don't need them determining who should get coverage and we definitely don't need politicians sucking up to these guys for campaign contributions. Yet, we have a fool like the Senate Minority Leader telling us that our healthcare system is the best. It is obvious he doesn't have a clue of how to read world wide statistics. Facts, though, never got in the way of a fool's proclamation.

The question is how did the government programs that attempted to build a great society become the problem when all the fault lies with corrupt bankers, fool hardy and chicken hawk politicians, and conservatives who think that the only government necessary is government that gives them tax breaks and allows them to operate free of any restriction in their pursuit of capital. In this curious world, environmental protection is tantamount to a crime while pollution is touted as a cost of doing business. Conservatives claim unions are at fault when in fact they were responsible for the iconic middle class which has shrunk due to the absolute ignorance of those who can't grasp a fundamental law of economic. If you give the rich a tax break they buy rich people things which benefit a few, while a working person will buy a house and housing, of course, is a good indicator of a vibrant economy though that would assume you keep the thieves out of the equation.

So, here we go folks. The gauntlet has been dropped. The “necons” have secured the Republicans. They are back with their fear and saber rattling. They have all the answers. They will talk of job creators and a country that is strong and possesses all the greatness it always has. They will talk of god as if they have had a personal audience with the almighty. Bottom line, they are full of themselves to such a degree that they cannot see the forest because of the trees. They have, in fact, been calling the shots along with the thieves on Wall Street for a long time. Industry has dominated the landscape forever while the public sector and the blue collar workers who once occupied a sliver of a middle class have faded because of a hostile environment created by two bit snake oil salesmen who have charmed the electorate with guile and deceit all the while waving a flag and singing patriotic tunes. This country is in a decline and I fear Romney, the newly anointed pied piper, is tooting a tune that is nothing more than a call to the masses to follow him as he leads them to the precipice, where, if perchance, he convinces them, they will, like lemmings, fall into the abyss of inane conservatism. The truth is the true conservatives have long opted out of the fray for the crazies are in control.