Juan Cole: I lived to See the Day when the Pope and the President of Iran are more doctrinally Flexible than the GOP

Full article here: http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/i-lived-to-see-th … e-gop.html

The United States has all along been a society dominated by the wealthy, and more especially by the business classes. But businesspeople are not all cut from the same cloth. You had high-minded responsible businessmen like Benjamin Franklin and you had mean-spirited businessmen, including the plantation slave-owners.

In recent months we have been bombarded by news items emanating from the really, really do-absolutely-nothing GOP-dominated House of Representatives, which when it does do something usually does something downright mean. Also rigid and unthinking and narrow-minded and wrong-headed. There, I’ve repeated myself. It might have been enough to say “GOP.” And some of the Republicans in the Senate haven’t been much better.

At a time when Pope Francis I has called for the Church to be less rigid in its attitudes toward e.g. gays as persons, and when President Hassan Rowhani of Iran has sought a more reasonable tone toward the US and Israel, our hard line Republicans have become more and more blinkered.
The House of Representatives has just passed a budget that would keep the government operating until later this fall, as the fiscal year ends, but only if the Senate and President Obama agree to defund the Affordable Health Care Act, which is the law of the land and cannot be defunded.

Note that the GOP House did not actually pass a proper budget. It doesn’t believe enough in government to do that. It just permitted the government not to close down altogether, but only if it can impose its minority views on the rest of the country. President Obama ran twice on health care reform and if the country had wanted to get rid of the AHCA, it could have voted for Mitt Romney but it didn’t. The GOP House has wasted a lot of time attempting to repeal Obamacare, which it cannot do at the moment because the Democrats have the Senate and the presidency. They know this. Governing for them has become like a strange ritual.


The GOP is willing to try to destroy the AHCA, even though this act benefits some 30 million Americans who otherwise lack health insurance. Apparently they are supposed to do without medical care until they get deathly ill, at which case they should take a chance on Emergency Room Treatment. …. It is only business interests that would benefit from the latter’s demise. Not the middle classes who pay the taxes and don’t have Caribbean tax havens. Not the poor, whose health suffers from lack of medical care and physician access. Children are much less healthy later in life if their mothers had no regular physician visits, and lack of such visits raises the risk of miscarriage and infant mortality.

The GOP House, in trying to get rid of Obamacare, is literally acting as baby-killers. They are set on this course the way the Inquisition used to be determined to burn heretics at the stake. They are loyal servants of the corporations, the way the Aztecs were loyal servants of the gods to whom they sacrificed innocent victims.

The Grand old Party of Scrooge likewise cut $4 billion a year in food stamps. Having deregulated the banks and encouraged the demon instrument of derivatives and driven the country into the ground with their economic policies, the Republicans now want to heap further punishment on the very people they have made homeless. Before the apogee of GOP policy in 2008, 11 percent of Americans were poverty-stricken and food insecure. Every year since the Great GOP Depression of the 21st Century, the percentage of food insecure people in America has been over 14. The GOP, having advocated baby-killing through the abolition of Obamacare, now wants to engage in baby-starving.

Not since British landlords actually exported food from Ireland for profit during the Great Famine of the 1840s have we seen this kind of hard-heartedness in an elite.
Have we had a rash of mass killings? Should we have gun control? No, because a handful of huge corporations such as Colt and others make billions off semi-automatic pistols and rifles. The GOP doesn’t represent the children who are shot down by the mentally unbalanced with those weapons. It represents the manufacturers and the retailers who make money off the sale of military-style weapons to civilians.

Is Iran’s new president positioning himself for serious negotiations with the US? Sen Lindsey Graham calls for war on Tehran, and Congress passes stringent new sanctions that amount to financial warfare on that country.
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It is the policy of a cult, not of a national party that has a hope of gaining the presidency. They should take a lesson from other cults that have attempted to rule in a narrow and injurious manner, producing public anger and backlash against them. Indeed, that was exactly the charge against deposed Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi. There won’t be a coup against the GOP Scrooges, but it seems very likely that there will be a wave of public revulsion that reduces them to further isolation and irrelevance.


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  • The Koch brothers are behind many of the everybody but us movements. Texass recently passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Besides requiring women to go to the clinic twice, once to get talked out of it and the second time for the procedure it also requires all clinics to be certified as surgical centers. So in a state where it requires 8 to 10 hours to drive from one side of the state to the other, all but 3 of the clinics in the state will be forced to close. They of course say this is to protect women. But their real intent is clear, they want to do an end run around the Supreme Court and make it incredibly hard for women, especially poor women to access abortion.

    Personally I find abortion abhorrent and a poor form of birth control. But I don't have a vagina. Neither do most of the GOP white men who passed this law.
    txholdup 09/24/2013 11:24 AM
  • @art4u--my sentiments, but not my writing. Juan Cole's piece, again, here's the link for the piece from Cole's website (I had to edit to make the version here fit, hence the ellipses): http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/i-lived-to-see-th … e-gop.html
    furball 09/22/2013 06:53 PM
  • Furball,
    is this you?!
    art4you 09/22/2013 06:45 PM
  • rjzip, it's the same with gun control. Unfortunately, this is the way "public information" campaigns work these days. They aren't about informing the public. They are about molding public opinion in the direction the entity paying for the campaign wants. And if it takes spreading out-and-out lies, so be it. I'm not going to say the left doesn't do it to (they do), but the right has just become the master of it. Probably because of the money factor. And also they are dealing with an audience that is predisposed to believe their lies.
    BearinFW 09/22/2013 04:38 PM
  • Thanks for this article.

    I get a kick out of that new TV ad (anti-Obamacare) paid for by the Koch brothers that shows a creepy Uncle Sam inspecting a woman's vagina. It is SOOOO ironic that the party that (in some states) forces women to have unnecessary ultra sound probes shoved up their vaginas thinks the government is going to come between doctor and patient. Just a few facts for people of fair mind about this:
    Obamacare is NOT a government takeover of health care as the liars contend. It isn't health care at all. It could more accurately be called a health insurance regulation law. It allows those who could not previously afford health insurance to get it. It forces insurance companies to actually spend a reasonable amount of the money YOU pay them, on YOUR medical needs as opposed to advertising, etc. And it forces insurance companies to compete for millions of new customers in markets set up by states.

    A study by the Kaiser Family Founcation (March 5-10, 2013) found that there are several misperceptions about the Affordable Healthcare Act. For instance, 40% still believe the act sets up a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare. This is NOT true. 44% still think the law cuts benefits for people on Medicare. NOT true. 47% think the act allows undocumented immigrants to recieve subsidies to purchase insurance. NOT true. 57% think the act provides a "Public Option" for health insurance. NO, it does NOT. All insurance remains from insurance companies. Incidentally, everyone already on insurance can keep what they have. The law does not change any relationship with either your insurance company or with your doctor.

    On the other hand, while 88% like the idea, 52% believe it doesn't provide tax credits for small businesses to buy insurance. It DOES! While 80% think it would be a good idea to create health insurance exchanges where companies woud profit from new customers while the poor would gain by being allowed to take advantage of group rates, only 58% think the law does this. It DOES. And there were a total of 11 such advantages that the public liked but were unaware the law provides.
    rjzip 09/22/2013 10:21 AM
  • The situation in the U.S. House is absolutely unprecedented. You have an entire wing of Congress that refuses to govern. I mean they have refused to do almost *anything* that amounts to actual governance for pretty much two full years now, and it's unlikely to change for the remainder of Obama's term of office. They're already just stalling until the 2016 election.

    I wrote my GOP congressman saying that his party is acting like a bunch of little kids who didn't get what they wanted and just decided to take their ball and go home.

    Of course, I didn't hear a word back.
    BearinFW 09/22/2013 03:57 AM