“We’re taking our toys – and yours – and going home!”
Tea party Republicans have opted out of the United States. They have ceased to participate in our democracy. Where political power is supposed to derive from the people, the tea party derives its power from corporations. It speaks for corporations, it acts for corporations. It has never spoken or acted for the American people. And now with the shutdown it has made clear that it never will.
Not only have America’s interests been attacked – our standing and our reputation overseas, our ability to defend ourselves from attack – but the American peoples’ interests have been attacked. People, already beaten down by tea party Republicanism, now find themselves deprived of essential services and 2 million federal employees are seeing their paychecks delayed while 800,000 civilian federal employees are losing their paychecks altogether. Veterans are losing benefits, flu shots are not being given. WIC will shut down and mothers and children left hungry. The list goes on.
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Bad as all this is, the Republicans are actually happy about it, as giddy as revolutionaries, to have attacked the American people so successfully. Our fragile economy, so painstakingly brought back from the precipice over the past five years, is poised to take a swift kick in the backside by gleeful Republican politicians.
“Take a dirt nap, USA!”
Tea party Republicans did not just let the government shut down. They carefully planned and orchestrated this terrorist attack on America. And as I said above, they’re just as happy as can be. Rachel Maddow pointed to this fact on Tuesday, calling the GOP “giddy” and on Wednesday, Michele Bachmann told Sean Hannity that “this is about the happiest” her party has been in a long time. Last week, The Washington Post quoted Bachmann as saying “We’re very excited. It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.”
Worse, we’ve seen them call for secession and revolt, and even issue an invitation for the military to intervene and “save” our republic by destroying it (because military dictatorships are so democracy-friendly). It is sad to think we have lived to see the Grand Old Party become a byword for treason. They have used the excuse of terrorism to feed the military industrial complex’s appetites for years and all the while they were planning their own insider attack.
“Et tu, Ted?”
It is a well known historical fact that the assassins of Julius Caesar – Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus – saw themselves as patriots, just as do Ted Cruz and his fellow conspirators. Brutus and Cassius thought they would be hailed as saviors of the republic when they stabbed Caesar to death.
But the people loved Caesar, and the conspirators had miscalculated: they fled for their lives and were hunted down, defeated, and killed. It is instructive to note that in Dante’s Inferno, only three people are so evil that they get chewed up by Satan’s mouths: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot.
Make room for Ted Cruz, our modern-day Benedict Arnold.
“Infamy”
Pearl Harbor. 9/11. This shutdown is a punch below the belt. An attack not only on America but on Americans. As insidious as any al Qaeda plot and all the worse because it is an act by people we ought to be able to trust, people the American people elected to look out for their interests, not attack them. Yes, the Taliban is an enemy of America but the GOP has shown itself to be THE enemy and for this act of terrorism let their memory be damned in the years, decades, and centuries to come.
Horsey comic from LATimes
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
