Brain
Posts: 3792
Joined: 2/14/2007 Status: offline
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This article is an accurate analysis of the current political situation. The title gives the impression the article is about Republicans but it's really about the Democrats. Democrats need to fight for progressive policies to re-build a strong middle class. Neither party stands up anymore for working and middle class Americans. Democrats need to legislate campaign finance reform and take the corporate money out politics. It's a long article which I have tried to summarize. Today’s Republican Party has three wings: the psychiatric wing, the corporate wing, and the Democrats. The first wing, the psychiatric wing, is defined by severe psychological and intellectual impairments, exemplified by the inability to read a birth certificate. … The second wing is the corporate wing, also known as the wing-tip wing. Today's wing-tips, are defined by three articles of faith. The first is that whatever ails you (whether budget deficits, unemployment, or kidney failure), the solution is tax cuts for the rich. The second is the belief (this one true) that whatever ails them can be fixed within any two-year election cycle by an infusion of venture capital from the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, Big Oil, the Pharmaceutical lobby, or whosever interests could be served or threatened by some piece of legislation. The third belief that defines the wing-tips is that deficits present a grave threat to our way of life -- except when Republicans are in power, at which point deficits are deficit-neutral. These are the Paul Ryan and John Boehner Republicans, whose virtue is that they seem genuinely to believe what they are paid to say. Some of them, like Ryan, can even do so with earnest looks on their faces (something Boehner has not mastered, even while smearing his mascara). So how did we get to this point, where Democrats in Washington are looking increasingly difficult for the average American to distinguish from Republicans, as the two parties focus with equal fervor on how to find $50-60 billion in budget cuts after passing twice that amount in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and then wring their hands that the deficit is out of control ("there's gambling in this establishment!")? That brings us to the third reason so many Democrats have created a third wing of the Republican Party: because they're competing for the same corporate money, which leads them to support the same policies. The major difference between Republicans and Democrats is that virtually all of the Republicans are quite comfortable being bought because it fits their ideology, whereas most of the Democrats who are beholden to one industry or another are conflicted about it -- but not conflicted enough to pass a fair elections bill when they had the chance last year that might have taken away some of the advantages of incumbency but restored integrity to our electoral system. The Democrats are at a crossroads. They can continue to populate the third wing of the Republican Party, or alternatively, they can return to progressive principles, starting by articulating for themselves as well as the American people what those principles are. (Personally, I have no idea what it means to be a Democrat anymore, other than to "talk about jobs," as if talking about them will somehow magically create them, while searching for compromises with Republicans at each successive "budget crisis" -- this time the debt ceiling -- that will endanger even more jobs.) http://www.alternet.org/news/151345/the_3_wings_of_the_republican_party%3A_the_crazies%2C_the_corporatists_..._and_democrats/?page=entire
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