A Crisis of Republican Faith

PH readers: A great group of guys in this northern New England ‘hood, ranging in their politics from Attila to Tinkerbelle, carries on a sporadic, satirical public-policy debate by e-mail. The resident GOP-right-or-wrong booster — let’s call him “Pete” — takes perverse delight in admitting GWB’s a moral idiot and many of his policies disasters, yet crowing that GOP rule is a blessing that’s here to stay. His latest missive, urging all us worried types to relax and enjoy “39 more months” of Bush-league government, prompted this farrago from yours truly. Since a number of folks have asked if they could forward it, I figured it belonged on this neglected blog.
Dear Pete,
As you know, you have long since converted me to Republican wisdom. Nothing in my life has been so liberating, spiritually or financially, as the Christian right’s discovery that commie-pinko clerics have deliberately mistranslated Christ’s words for the last 2,000 years. Who would have suspected that “Love thy neighbor” actually meant “Fuck thy neighbor”? But it makes so much more sense! I mean, how could anyone live by that elitist riddle? The GOP gospel’s so easily accessible, it’s no wonder even our charity-C student, drug-addled future Bedwetter-In-Chief got religion!
But Pete, every time I settle into not worrying and being happy, you come along and rattle my comfortable cage with some inadvertently terrifying factoid. Like, “another 39 months” of Dubya? Thirty-fucking-nine?
Holy shit, Pete. I mean, I’m trying to be a good Republican, to skip thinking and just believe, but I can’t help remembering that in much fewer than 48 months, the Great Unificator and his pals not only managed to ignore the loudest signals of incoming attack since those midget subs appeared in Pearl Harbor, but then turned the 9/11 tragedy into a nonstop economic tailspin, the excuse for two utterly botched, ruinously expensive and unending wars, and the passage of laws more restrictive of citizens’ rights than any seen since the Palmer Raids. Now we have more enemies abroad than we could ever have imagined, and our rep as the world’s bastion of freedom is about as legit as the writs by which we run a low-intensity, no-legality torture chamber in Guantanamo Bay.
And heck, then I couldn’t help thinking that the Adminstration repeated the same performance by ignoring the Katrina warnings, exhibiting the neocons’ usual disdain for learning from experience and for useful planning (as opposed to warmongering, ideological mouthing-off and making sure their campaign contributors have plenty of White House office space in which to write energy legislation). They helped turn a big chunk of the USA into an unnecessarily dangerous and economically dead-in-the-water disaster area — — unless, of course, you work for KBR et al, who are now looting the American treasury on our own soil, where once they had to go all the inconvenient way to Iraq.
And speaking of money, sometimes I worry about the way liberating the rich from unfair taxation — and let’s face it, all taxation of rich people is unfair; tax the poor, those parasites! — is dooming any chance of balancing the budget into the imaginable future. This is the same mess Ronnie got into, only we’re not outspending the Russkies to win the Cold War. We’re just outspending ourselves! I mean, I know this is somehow a good thing, but then I remember that we didn’t get a balanced budget until the Clinton years, when taxes were raised to reasonable levels, services were secure and everyone got plenty rich anyway…
You see my problem? I mean, in way less than four years (including record-breaking vacation time), Dubya and Co. more or less freaking positioned the country to be the world’s next great bankrupt oligarchy — sort of a SuperMexico. And while I know that this is God’s will, sometimes I get a little scared.
I mean, give these guys 39 more months and we could be at war with China or Iran or DisneyWorld or Spanish Harlem or Mars. Screw ANWR: We could be boiling whale blubber for lamp oil. We could be keeping every vegetative accident victim in the world on million-dollar-a-year perpetual life support and forcing every pregnant 14-year-old to carry to term a child who’ll never know Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, adequately funded public schools, unemployment benefits, student loans, verifiable voting, separation of church and state, checks and balances in government, or a time when chumps like Harriet Miers never got near the Supreme Court and America was ashamed of the word “empire.”
Not that any of these are necessarily bad things, you know, but gee… I guess I’ll have to go study my Revised Conservative Bible a little more. I always get cheered up when Jesus says, “This above all: Screw they neighbor, not thyself.” But then I read on and notice that, even in this version, the guys who nail Him up aren’t horn-headed, alien Jews. They’re regular-guy soldiers of empire, doing what empires always do…
Awaiting your get-happy guidance,
Bill

— — HistoryBuff