Republican Hypocrisy

Here's an excellent clip of Rachel Maddow running down the list of hypocritical politcal maneuvers by the Republicans, i.e take one side, then hop to the other. You know, "flip flop". (Think back: this is the claim that Republicans used so successfully against Democrats during the Bush years. Where is the media now on "flip flop". All I head is stone cold silence from the media.) Wait a second... the Republicans are doing something worse than flip flop, they are practicing hypocrisy. They claim to stand for something, but when the Democrats take up the cause, the Republicans turn their backs and deny support to it.

Here is Rachel Maddow naming names... enjoy this recitation of in-your-face hypocrisy:



What I don't understand is why voters in the US can't keep this political sleaze in mind when they go into the polling booth.

I do understand why the media doesn't cover this: the media is owned by the rich, so they aren't keen on pointing out the inner workings of their own propaganda machine.

I don't understand why the Democrats are so flat footed on beating the bushes to publicize this hypocrisy. The Republicans were very effective at painting their opponents every shade of black they could. Why can't the Democrats?

I don't like the weak-kneed Obama approach to politics. He has failed to deliver on the promises he offered in his campaign. I despise his currying favour with Wall Street. But he is head and shoulders above the slime-ball Republicans and their in-your-face hypocrisy, their "destroy the village to order save it" ideology:

One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Bến Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."

If you want to read the argument for how the Obama "stimulus bill" has been useful, read this article by Daniel Gross at Slate. Here's a key bit:

So in the year since the stimulus bill was passed, it's become more and more difficult for opponents to make the case against it. And that opposition will get tougher still, because the stimulus has barely kicked into gear. The package was designed to be rolled out over a three-year period, in part because of logistics (it's tough to approve tens of billions of dollars of loan guarantees to wind-energy farms and solar power arrays in a few months) and in part because of politics. Recovery.gov shows that only about one-third of what has been budgeted for tax breaks, new spending, and entitlements has been spent. While Congress' horizon extends only as far as November 2010, the Obama administration is looking ahead to November 2012. Congressional Democrats would have preferred a frontloaded stimulus that spent everything in 2010; the White House isn't particularly troubled that large chunks of the stimulus won't hit the economy until 2011. Thanks to the stimulus bill, there's still $515 billion worth of tax cuts, contracts and loans, and aids to entitlement programs set to enter the economy in the next two years. That will contribute powerfully to growth in 2010 and 2011.

As the above points out, Obama chose a "slow" recovery feeding the simulus money in over three years. The result has been much worse unemployment that necessary. That's my complaint about Obama. He does everything in half measures. He doesn't lead. He doesn't throw himself into the fight against the Great Recession. Everything is "calculated" and only half measures. And the great tragedy is that he allowed himself to be talked into the idea that the downturn wouldn't be as bad as it has been. So his 'half' measures turned into 'one third' measures with a lot more unnecessary suffering than there should have been.

Rather than ending on my sour reflections on the "stimulus", here's a bit from a more upbeat assessment by David Leonhardt of the NY Times:

Yet I’m guessing you don’t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You’ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you’ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.

And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.