I posted this on DKos, and thought it might be interesting to some here too.
The Biggest Reason Republicans Have Wrecked America
by sww92498 [Subscribe] [Edit Diary]
Sat Dec 24, 2005 at 06:16:53 AM PDT
At DailyKos, we bombard ourselves with all the reasons why the current litter of Republicans are so damaging to our beloved country: incompetence, a culture of exclusion and demonizing people who are different in any way, a culture of lying and corruption, the fucking lunatic religious right who don’t understand Jesus or the values of their own political Founders, did I mention incompetence, the dismantling of the New Deal and Civil Rights which made America the light of the world in how working men and women can be both politically and economically free in a capitalist society and served as an antidote to state socialism, redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the uber rich, and of course all of us could go on and on.
The reason isn’t because we’re negative Democrats, it’s because the Bush Administration and the last 25 years of Republicans give us so many example.
There’s more after the fold.
sww92498’s diary :: ::
Given all this, there is one huge Bush disaster that is more dangerous to our very way of life than any of these.
The argument that the United States either is or should be an imperial power in the 21st century has been made many times since the end of the Cold War. The American imperium has been compared to both the Roman and the British empires. For those people who do so favorably, they are completely missing the point that empires that arise out of democracies destroy the democracy. We can see that in the United States simply with the effect of the Patriot Act, and the unconstitutional abuse of power by Bush by spying on Americans without a warrant. This kind of abuse of power would get my son, a police sergeant, reprimanded, fired or perhaps thrown in jail. Shouldn’t the President be subject to the same.
This abuse, however, pales in significance to the catastophic effects of Bush’s tax cuts for the uber rich, and the Republican controlled government’s unwillingness to pay for our government spending themselves. They would rather bankrupt our country, making China our sugar daddy, then be fucking responsible for their own decisions.
This is how they have destroyed America. They have sold themselves to China. When the British were the world’s superpower they were also the world’s largest creditor. When Democrats ran our country after WWII up to 1980, we were the world’s largest creditor. Reagan turned the United States into the world’s largest debtor nation. The Clinton Administration turned that around only to have Bush II hurl us into the arms of the Chinese.
John Gray, in “The Mirage of Empire” in the NY Review of Books states,
“Unlike Britain in the nineteenth century, which was the world’s largest exporter of capital, the United States is the world’s largest debtor. In effect America’s military adventures are paid for with borrowed money–notably that lent by China, whose purchases of American government debt have become crucial in underpinning the US economy. This dependency on China cannot easily be squared with the idea that the US is acting as the world’s unpaid global enforcer. It is America’s foreign creditors who fund this role, and if they come to perceive US foreign policy as dangerously threatening or irrational they are in a position to raise its costs to the point where they become prohibitive. As Emmanuel Todd, the French analyst who, in 1975, forecast the impending Soviet collapse, has noted:
The United States is unable to live on its own economic activity and must be subsidized to maintain its current level of consumption—at present cruising speed that subsidy amounts to 1.4 billion dollars a day (as of April 2003). If its behavior continues to be disruptive, it is America that ought to fear an embargo.[4]”
Try this scenario on for catastophe: the Bushies come up with some other foreign adventure that the Chinese care about,it doesn’t really matter what the particular case will be, just that the Chinese want to get their way. All the Chinese have to do to collapse the American economy and get Bush, the so-called defender of America to kowtow is call in their debt. Imagine an America that is 1000 worse than it was the week after Hurricane Katrina. This is the legacy of the Republican Party. They need to be expunged like the bad infection they are.