Evoking the Declaration of Independence in rather explicit terms, the Republicans have released their 2010 version of the Contract With America. Let’s look at the preamble, wherein President Obama takes on the role of King George III.
A PLEDGE TO AMERICA
America is more than a country.
America is an idea – an idea that free people can govern themselves, that government’s powers are derived from
the consent of the governed, that each of us is endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. America is the belief that any man or woman can – given economic,
political, and religious liberty – advance themselves, their families, and the common good.America is an inspiration to those who yearn to be free and have the ability and the dignity to determine their
own destiny.Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute
a new governing agenda and set a different course.These first principles were proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the Constitution, and
have endured through hard sacrifice and commitment by generations of Americans.In a self-governing society, the only bulwark against the power of the state is the consent of the governed, and
regarding the policies of the current government, the governed do not consent.An unchecked executive, a compliant legislature, and an overreaching judiciary have combined to thwart the
will of the people and overturn their votes and their values, striking down long-standing laws and institutions
and scorning the deepest beliefs of the American people.
An arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites makes decisions, issues mandates, and enacts
laws without accepting or requesting the input of the many.
Rising joblessness, crushing debt, and a polarizing political environment are fraying the bonds among our
people and blurring our sense of national purpose.Like free peoples of the past, our citizens refuse to accommodate a government that believes it can replace the
will of the people with its own. The American people are speaking out, demanding that we realign our country’s
compass with its founding principles and apply those principles to solve our common problems for the common
good.The need for urgent action to repair our economy and reclaim our government for the people cannot be
overstated.
Now, I gotta call bullshit on Republicans plagiarizing Thomas Jefferson without attribution at the same time that they have stricken discussion of his role in the anti-monarchial revolutions from public schools in Texas.
[Texas Board of Education member] Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)
“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.
If the Declaration of Independence didn’t influence the French Revolution or the Revolutions of 1848, then it sure as hell can’t be badly edited to influence us now in a little midterm election. No points for style here, folks.
It’s interesting that the Republicans are calling Obama a tyrant, though. That’s a nice touch. So, they “refuse to consent” to be governed by him and they “refuse to accommodate” him. That’s also nice.
I particularly liked this next part:
Rising joblessness [caused by us], crushing debt [caused by us], and a polarizing political environment [caused by us] are fraying the bonds among our people and blurring our sense of national purpose.
So, vote for us. What a joke!
Except this is serious.
Like a heart attack.
These idiots don’t understand self-awareness or irony, do they?
Considering they say they are going to repeal health care reform, and then create a new plan that has…surprise!…all the same benefits that are currently in Obama’s health care reform law, I’d have to say the answer to that is “no”.
would we ever see them leave their tanning beds long enough to actually do something like the founding fathers? how about spending a few months camped out at Valley Forge? (well nowadays there’s room service from a hotel down the street) or sacrificing some of their wealth in the cause – don’t think so. their cause is all about looting the wealth of The People
I gotta say, I laughed out loud at that last quoted aspect. I read “our people” as white, old Republicans and Real Murikhans. National purpose…this makes no sense.
It’s like they took nice sounding words and strung them together. “Blurring our sense of national purpose.” What is our national purpose? Our urban poor, the hundreds of homeless people, many of them veterans of our dirty wars, are they reaping the benefits of this great society of which we so self-indulgently pride ourselves on being a part? Our despised illegal immigrants, who do the work of slaves with almost nothing in the way of recompense so that we can enjoy our bloated standards of living while reviling the very people who make them possible? The millions upon millions in this nation who don’t have access to even basic health care?
What is our national purpose? Whenever I hear these assholes speak, I hear “bootstraps, bitches.”
They have outdone themselves in creating high sounding bullshit that has no bearing with reality. It is a Teabagger manifesto.
A least the Contract With America listed specific actions they proposed to take. It was coherent. It was understandable. It stood for something. It was a document rooted in reality. I didn’t like it, of course, but it was a rational alternative to the Democratic platform. This is just nonsensical crap. Gingrich was a thinker, a professor, albeit a nasty person. The people who concocted this have shit for brains. So does anyone who buys it.
Hopefully, someone in the media besides Stewart, Colbert, Olbermann, Maddow, Schultz, and Ratigan will make fun of it. It is more juvenile than Gingrich’s Contract on America.
Sounds like an anti-administration screed that my buddies could have written in the eighth grade casting the principal as George III.
That the opposition party has come to this is pathetic…and very dangerous.
And there is a mistake:
Dang! I got my wish, and according to reports it’s — wait for it — Erick Erickson who was first to lampoon this stupidity.
When you lose Erick the RedState, you have lost what? A kneejerk propagandist won’t hype it. No doubt Beck and Limbaugh will get out the old GOP hymnbook and sing praises to what God Boner has delivered.
Hard to improve on any of the above comments. Funny that they even bothered to include a reference to Eisenhower, considering that they wrote his kind out of the GOP long ago. What spoiled, pathetic little children they are.
I’d join you in laughing if I didn’t think it was damned effective.
They’re calling to the blood, it has nothing to do with reason or logic. It’s not even about emotion … it’s about appealing to primal, archetypal and very powerful iconic themes and wrapping them around the neck of your enemy.
This is the part of their politics that most clearly reminds me of the fascist governments in Europe in the 1930s.
Heil Palin! It sounds ridiculous, but I suppose Heil Hitler also did at first.
You really damage your arguments making comments like that, in my opinion. Palin and the Tea Partiers are nowhere close to Hitler and the Nazis, even the Nazis of the 1930’s. Yes the Tea Party is scary, and yes it contains a number of disturbing fascist tendencies. But to compare them, or really almost any other group, to the Nazis does a historical disservice to all those victims of the Nazis. Hitler and Co. were unimaginably worse than Palin and Co. When you throw comparisons like that around you blur the boundaries between the two groups in a highly inaccurate and even dangerous way.
He’s not making a comparison to Nazis, he’s making a comparison to demagogues, and I’d argue that Beck and Palin ARE demagogues like Hitler.
He isn’t saying Palin’s going to lead the charge to execute Mexicans/teh gay/liberals, but that they’re leading the charge in the same fashion with knee-jerk reactionary followers.
If you stop for a minute to think about what would happen to minorities and gays if the Teahadists came to power, the Hitler comparison is really not far off. What fuels their movement is their simmering hatred of the other. Should they ever be empowered to act out their hatred I expect something similar to the terrorism and violence that ocured toward the end of Reconstruction.
The anti-intellectualism part of it is what shows it to be truly dangerous. I mean, Newt Gingrich used to be third-in-line to the presidency, and he’s talking about the president imposing Sharia Law on the country and starting to lop off people’s heads without due process.
Hitler and Nazis have nothing to do with what’s going on here. They’re not even useful as a benchmark, comparison, whatever. We are now witnessing an obsessively and peculiarly home-grown American kind of madness without reason, full of nastiness and frustration, tinged with religion and greed. The source of the frustration seems to stem from general intolerance of anything different from the self-defined norm: that’s putting the obvious mildly! You know, everyone lives down-home on the farm even though nowadays hardly any one does. You can make it, just try harder.
Doesn’t it ever occur to us that the extreme far right of the US might create a situation for the large majority of the US people which is much worse than the people of the Third Reich experienced until everything went south for the Nazis?
The Handmaid’s Tale isolated that dystopia in the South (Gilead). The danger here is more widespread geographically. And the punitive nature of it will not be isolated to hanging adulteresses in front of Duke Chapel. A little Orwell, a little Brazil, a little rural sheriff tyranny. All those threads are there.
That possibility exists, but it is not the only possibility and it is not an inevitability. The American people, especially Democrats and progressives (and the union of those two sets) have the power to stop this trend in its tracks by breaking the narrative.
That’s why, as imperfect as the individual Democratic candidates are, it is important for Republicans to lose, lose big, lose symbolic leaders, and force a change in the national narrative.
‘Go south’ = I meant ‘get bad’, not a reference to the southern US. Of course repugnants must lose big time. Nothing’s inevitable (death!). Something very, very twisted is going on right now. No one seems to understand. Maybe it just comes down to the fear caused by feeling the increasing loss of wealth in the country as a whole and the steady decrease in world dominance. See China, for example. Didn’t Marx say something about the capitalists destroying themselves? Again, see China and other countries = offshoring and big corporate profits but dwindling employment opportunities in the US. Brought to you courtesy of Reagan, Bush, CLINTON (don’t forget him) and, again, Bush. Obama?
An interesting set of comments! Some claim I’m way off because Palin and the Tea Party are not nearly as bad as the Nazis and others claim I’m way off because they are much worse than the Nazis.
For the record:
I have heard people who are Teabaggers advocate rounding up illegal aliens, placing them in giant prison camps and machine-gunning them. Is this better or worse than Kyklon B?
I have heard people who are Teabaggers say that all gays should be castrated.
I have heard people who are Teabaggers say that anyone who has or assists an abortion should be executed.
Satan never sleeps.
I worked with a black man on the night shift who had a reputation for hating whites. Over the course of a year we became pretty good friends. One night he asked me, with real bewilderment,” In the Old South slaves outnumbered Whites. Why didn’t they revolt and kill their masters by sheer force of numbers?” My reply, which I do believe, was “I really think that we white people are meaner and crueler than you black people.”
Is the electorate stuoid enough to swallow this horseshit ?!
Enough of it is to keep things interesting.
I want to know why people in Michigan aren’t naming their children after Obama. If Corker and Shelby had their way, all your jobs would now be in Tennessee and Alabama and the Auto Unions would be dead.
Are you kidding, nobody can afford to have a kid here these days.
We will see on November 2, won’t we.
It seems the new pledge is just not teabaggish enough for the Tea Partiers so I have a feeling it will disappear down the memory hole. They have an overwhelming desire to destroy the Republican Party.
Indeed.
The Goat F’er actually said something wise.
Rep Clyburn has already named it “Plague on America.”